Oddities in RH 5.0

Tres Melton (tres@chaffee.net)
Sun, 28 Dec 1997 06:20:20 -0700

Please forgive me if this post is not appropriate for either of these two
groups since I just joined redhat-list and this is my first post to either
redhat or bugtraq (except for a previous plea for help that Aleph One
answered on BUGTRAQ).

I have Redhat 5.0 (that came with an Applixware update) and have installed
it on my system. I have run pwconv to change to shadowed passwords. This
is an extremly limited installation (nothing checked on the install
options). I have then added only certain packages (some binary and some
source). I have installed the shadow-utils and passwd SRPMS as well.

If I run "useradd -p pass1 test1" I get the oddest thing in /etc/shadow:

test1:pass1:10223:0:99999:7:::

That doesn't look exactly cool to me. If you run passwd you can fix that
little problem. I then ran "useradd test2" and got the following:

/etc/shadow: test2:!:10223:0:99999:7:::
/etc/passwd: test2:x:502:502::/home/test:/bin/bash

looks cool so far right? Now run "passwd test2" and set the password.
Now the entries read like so:

/etc/shadow: test2:!:10223:0:99999:7:::
/etc/passwd: test2:R0KYaK5ivSnk6:501:501::/home/test2:/bin/bash

Seems to me like it updated the wrong file.

I had a problem with the shadow suite putting an '!' for a non-password
somewhere before and had to patch the source to make it use an '*'
instead. It was in an old Slackware release. I haven't had the time to
investigate this yet. I don't understand why the shadow suite uses an '*'
for accounts with non-passwords when it converts regular /etc/passwd files
and uses an '!' for all new non-passwords. A feature maybe? I don't even
know if this is the problem.

Anybody got any ideas? Tres,

. . ___ . . . Tres Melton, IS Manager
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