Compatibility Issues

Not all IBM Informix products and tools support PAM or LDAP authentication:

• IBM Informix-4GL does not directly support PAM or LDAP authentication because it has no mechanism for identifying callback functions. However, if IBM Informix-4GL uses the correct version of CSDK, you can write C code that can be called from IBM Informix-4GL to handle the challenge and response protocol. To implement PAM, migrate to the new CSDK version, modify your applications to register a callback that can handle challenges and responses, and recompile your application.
• Products such as Informix SQL will not handle the challenge and response protocol.
• The DB-Access, dbexport, dbimport, dbload, and dbschema utilities support PAM. If they receive a challenge, they pass the challenge to the user and wait for a response. This is repeated for each challenge that the PAM module raises.
• The onmode, onstat, and oncheck server administration utilities do not use PAM. However, because these utilities operate on all Dynamic Server ports, the utilities can function with a PAM-enabled port.
• Other server utilities do not support PAM.

If you are using any tools that do not support PAM or LDAP authentication modules, then make connections to a DBSERVERALIAS that does not have the PAM parameters in the SQLHOSTS file.