--- Gus Wirth <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I'm looking at the man pages for passwd and shadow (man 5 passwd, man 5 > shadow), plus the Linux Shadow Password HOWTO, and none of them seem to > match what is actually happening on the system with respect to the actual > usage of the shadow file. In particular, I'm curious about the * and !! > password entries in the /etc/shadow file. > > I know that I'm supposed to use the source, but I think this will lead me > down the path of looking at all the libraries in PAM (Pluggable > Authentication Modules). Does anyone have a more succincint reference > available that I should consider? > > Gus
If a * is in the column for the encrypted password, no input to md5 or crypt will generate that as an output. As such, a user with that value cannot log in. I've not seen the !! before but would expect it to have similar results to *. James _____ James D. Keeline http://www.Keeline.com http://www.Keeline.com/articles http://Stratemeyer.org http://www.Keeline.com/TSCollection http://www.ITeachPHP.com -- Free Computer Classes: Linux, PHP, etc. Spring Semester Begins Jan 31 -- New Classes Start Every Few Weeks. -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-newbie
