The following example illustrates how a customized eauth executable can provide external authentication of users, hosts, and daemons. In this example, the eauth executable has been customized so that corresponding instances of eauth -c and eauth -s obtain user, host, and daemon credentials from a file that serves as the external security system. The eauth executable can also be customized to obtain credentials from an operating system or from an authentication protocol such as Kerberos.