Re: Shawdow passwords only half there

[Deryk Barker <dbarker camosun bc ca>]

Thus spake Paul Waldo (pwaldo sysnet net):

> Hi all,
> 
> I am running Red Hat 5.2 with shadow passwords installed.  I have run
> the password and group conversion utilities, so I know have the files
> /etc/shadow and /etc/gshadow
> I manually set the /etc/passwd and /etc/group file's permission to 600. 
> Most things work now.  For example I can log on (which is a good thing
> :-)  But other things are broken, for example:
> 
> [I have no name! delphi /etc]$ whoami
> whoami: cannot find username for UID 500
> 
> I have run strace on the whoami command and found that it is trying to
> look at /etc/passwd.  Is there something else that I need to do to get
> shadow passwords working fully?  TIA

The whole reason for shadow passwords is that the /etcpasswd file must
have permissions of 644 - many, many programs need to read it in order
to do the UID-username mapping (ls, for instance, in order to display
file ownership) - hence the requiement for putting the encrypted
password in the /etc/shadow file which does not have (or need) world
read access. 

chmod 644 /etc/passwd

andn you'll be laughing.

-- 
|Deryk Barker, Computer Science Dept. | Music does not have to be understood|
|Camosun College, Victoria, BC, Canada| It has to be listened to.           |
|email: dbarker camosun bc ca         |                                     |
|phone: +1 250 370 4452               |         Hermann Scherchen.          |