On Mon, 29 Sep 2003 05:41 pm, Michael James asked: When "passwd" runs for a user who doesn't have a line in /etc/shadow it just bungs the encrypted string into /etc/passwd! Argh! Nobody ever wants to go back to un-shadowed passwords. How can I turn off this unwantedly obliging behaviour?
On Mon, 29 Sep 2003 05:41 pm, Dirk Schreiner wrote:
now see, this is the default how passwd works under Linux. (Not only SuSE ;-))
Well, IMNSHO this is a Bad Thing (TM). In the absence of a shadow entry for the user in question passwd could grumble and fail, or it could create one. But it should NEVER put a password in a world readable file not even after hashing it. That's a throwback to before 1995.
If you want to restrict use of passwd to certain users, you should play with chmod and chown. I've already done this, and wrapped passwd in a script that gives users more explaination than just "permission denied"
-- Michael James michael.james@csiro.au System Administrator voice: 02 6246 5040 CSIRO Bioinformatics Facility fax: 02 6246 5166