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

[Kam Leo]

On Fri, Sep 26, 2008 at 10:58 PM, Don Russell
<fedora at drussell.dnsalias.com> wrote:
>
>
> 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. :-(
>

The passwd  rpm specified the creation of /etc/passwd. Since your
system already had an existing /etc/passwd file that spec instructions
were written such that the old file was not overwritten. Your old file
was protected and /etc/passwd.rpmnew was created. You should thank the
packager for being diligent.