who the %^#$ is messing with /etc/passwd ??

[Don Russell]

On Thu, Sep 25, 2008 at 4:56 AM, Bill Crawford
<billcrawford1970 at gmail.com>wrote:

> On Thursday 25 September 2008 12:41:13 Brian Millett wrote:
>
> > So the password field has changed from x to *  ????
> >
> > I know that that means look in /etc/shadow for the password, but what
> > inconsistancy will the older, established users find ??
>
> 'x' means look in /etc/shadow, '*' is one of several ways of indicating "no
> password" as in you can't log in, rather than "blank password" which lets
> all
> log in without one. The .rpmnew is the "unconverted" form, if you run
> pwunconv
> you'll see the same it /etc/passwd.
>
>

The /etc/passwd.rpmnew has 15 lines of userid stuff...
My /etc/passwd file has a lot more than that... and many I didn't even know
about.... (various system things ntpd blah blah blah)

Am I supposed to take the users that *I* added to the system (via
system-config-users) and cut/paste those ones into the new one, changing the
x to an *? And thereby dropping all those other ones that are set to nologon
anyway?

Does pwconv or pwunconv do this for me automatically? (The man file looks
great for people familiar with it... not so great for explaining what the
commands really do.) Shouldn't the update script have done this when it
updated setup?

       The pwconv command creates shadow from passwd and an optionally
existing
       shadow.

       The pwunconv command creates passwd from passwd and shadow and then
       removes shadow.

So where does passwd.rpmnew come into play?

pwconv ... and removes shadow... um, don't I need shadow?
ditto for pwunconv

I don't get it, now I don't know what I have. :-(
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