It seems like Grub does not accept the MD5 password format used in
/etc/shadow, at least not on Fedora 8. If I simply copy the string to
grub.conf and then press "p" at the Grub menu, two stars are displayed.
The password is not accepted regardless if I backspace away these
characters or not.
I've noticed that both the salt length and total length differs. A sample
password from /etc/shadow looks like:
$1$agMDK9U0$C1ssVE0GrvY4zG7h1L4L9/
This is in total 34 characters, with a salt length of 8, if I understand
the format correctly.
grub-md5-crypt, on the other hand, produces something like:
$1$FYqIF$LSQBagQ5S3ZuWr0ogBEN80
This is in total 31, with 5 characters salt.
The /etc/shadow format is documented on the crypt() man page:
"If salt is a character string starting with the three characters "$1$"
followed by at most eight characters, and optionally terminated by "$",
then instead of using the DES machine, the glibc crypt function uses an
MD5-based algorithm, and outputs up to 34 bytes, namely
"$1$<salt>$<encoded>", where "<salt>" stands for the up to 8 characters
following "$1$" in the salt, and "<encoded>" is a further 22 characters."
Perhaps Grub uses another format? On RedHat 7.3 with MD5 passwords in
/etc/passwd, it was possible to use these strings for Grub.
Regards,
---
Peter Åstrand ThinLinc Chief Developer
Cendio AB http://www.cendio.se
Wallenbergs gata 4
583 30 Linköping Phone: +46-13-21 46 00
_______________________________________________
Bug-grub mailing list
Bug-grub@gnu.org
http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/bug-grub
