On Thu, 18 Dec 2003, Bob Vickers wrote:
This unpleasant problem happens on 8.2 as well. I'm not certain, but I believe it started happening a few weeks after we upgraded to 8.2, so maybe it was caused by a security upgrade. Or maybe some SuSEconfig mischief.
You do realize that top-quoting makes it difficult to respond to specific points where both your post and mine touch on the same subject? Anyway, having dug into documention, the following from the NIS-HOWTO makes me appreciate the change: |13. Changing passwords with rpasswd | |The standard way to change a NIS password is to call yppasswd, on some |systems this is only an alias for passwd. This commands uses the yppasswd |protocol and needs a running rpc.yppasswdd process on the NIS master |server. The protocol has the disadvantage, that the old password will be |send in clear text over the network. This is not so problematic, if the |password change was successfull. In this case, the old password is |replaced with the new one. But if the password change fails, an attacker |can use the clear password to login as this user. Even more worse: If the |system administrator changes the NIS password for another user, the root |password of the NIS master server is transfered in clear text over the |network. And this one will not be changed. The text goes on to describe how to set up rpasswd to do this job for you. I'll certainly be looking into it as soon as I can. Bjørn -- Bjørn Tore Sund Phone: (+47) 555-84894 Stupidity is like a System administrator Fax: (+47) 555-89672 fractal; universal and Math. Department Mobile: (+47) 918 68075 infinitely repetitive. University of Bergen VIP: 81724 teknisk@mi.uib.no Email: bjornts@mi.uib.no http://www.mi.uib.no/