[rhn-users] importing user accounts

[Paul A. Kennedy]

On Tue, Nov 02, 2004 at 03:43:29PM -0500, Philippe B. Laval wrote:
> Helal,
> 
> 	Thanks for your quick reply.  I thought about doing that.  However,
> I think the way the password is encrypted must depend on the machine.  I did
> an experiment.  On two different machines, both running RedHat (7.0 and
> 8.0), I created a user with the same user name and user ID.  I assigned then
> the same password.  Yet, the entry in /etc/shadow for the password looked
> different.  This led me to believe that I could not just copy the files you
> mentioned, at least /etc/shadow.  Maybe I am wrong.  Does anybody know for
> sure?
> 
> P. Laval

The old style crypt function (man crypt) uses a one-way hashing function with a
perturbing "salt" parameter so that the same password hashed twice will only
result in the same encrypted string if the "salt" parameter is the same.

Reading the man page for crypt should make this a little more clear as well.


I would copy over only the user accounts and put the appropriate entries in
passwd, shadow, and smbpasswd.

Paul