Re: Adduser: strange -p option on RH5.2

["Binand Raj S." <binand@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

N.A. Prakash forced the electrons to say:
> 
> And by the way, a really naive question. When a new user is created with 
> useradd, what is the default password set by the system? I just couldnt  
> figure this out, and couldnt do a login. That's how i came to use that -p.
> A simple 'useradd name' created a '!!' entry in the encrypted password 
> field in /etc/shadow. I then tried 'passwd -u name', as mentioned in the man 
> page for passwd, to unlock the password, if that's what it was. This 
> didnt work, so i then used 'passwd -f name' to create a new password for the 
> new user.
> 

Any password, encrypted with the DES algorithm, will have exactly 13
characters. Since the entry in RH?.? in the /etc/passwd file is !!, which is
just 2 characters, it will not match _any_ password after encryption, so login
will fail. Thus, in RH5.2, the default is to keep the account locked, unless
explicitly unlocked (maybe by editing /etc/passwd - use the vipw command for
that).

I haven't fully checked out the MD5 algorithm that RH6.0 can support, but it
is likely that the concept is same.

Binand

- -- 
#include <stdio.h>                                   | Binand Raj S.
char *p = "#include <stdio.h>%cchar *p = %c%s%c;     | This is a self-
int main(){printf(p,10,34,p,34,10);return 0;}%c";    | printing program.
int main(){printf(p,10,34,p,34,10);return 0;}        | Try it!!

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