I think those are "shadow" passwords. The idea is that since lots of
passwords can be broken just by clever guessing, it's not usually a
good idea to store the hashed passwords (what used to be in your
/etc/passwd file) in a world-readable file (which /etc/passwd must be).
So those hashed passwords are stored in another place; on Linux that's
usually in /etc/shadow, but on OS X it's probably somewhere in the
NetInfo database.
I'm also guessing that your /etc/passwd file was in its pristine state
from a previous installation of OS X 10.2 or something, because I think
it's been using shadow mechanisms for a while now.
To get data from the NetInfo database, you can use the /usr/bin/niutil
command, though I don't specifically know how to query for passwords,
or even definitively that they're in there.
Sorry this message has so much guessing, but maybe it's a start....
-Ken
On Aug 27, 2005, at 7:42 PM, Jerry LeVan wrote:
Hi,
I just added a PC to my home network and was playing with
trying to access directories on my Mac OS X system and
suddenly my pop server quit working (qpopper). It had
been working fine for at least a year!
Not a single user could connect to the server via
telnet ( I can connect ok but sending the password
*always* fails).
I hopped into perl as root and tried:
macjerry:~ root# perl -de0
Loading DB routines from perl5db.pl version 1.28
Editor support available.
Enter h or `h h' for help, or `man perldebug' for more help.
main::(-e:1): 0
DB<1> print getpwnam "jerry"
jerry********501200Jerry LeVan/Users/jerry/bin/bash0
note the *'s where the password should be...I suspect this
is why qpopper is failing.
I think mucking around with enabling Mac OSX to allow
Windows Networking connections has mucked up how passwords
are handled.
I can still log on ok and the only thing that I have
found so far that is broken is the pop3 server I am
running.
How can I programatically determine if user "x" has password
"z"?
A cursory exam of the qpopper code "seems" to indicate that
the getpw family of functions seem to be used.
I have spent the better part of the day trying to run down
how to do user authentication on Mac OS X (10.4.2) but I
have not made any headway....
Thanks for any pointers.
Jerry
