[lobster_johnson]

I don't know much about this, but our sysadmin reports that Sinopia has a pluggable authentication system, and that we ended up writing our own plugin that uses PAM (and thus system accounts) underneath.

The auth token you need locally in your own .npmrc is added automatically when you do "npm login".

[warfangle]

That's new, then. When we were looking at it, you had to supply the npm auth token to the yaml config: it was just plaintext checking against its list of available logins.

We wanted something available "now," not "in a bit, after we write an auth plugin for it."