Support for shadow passwords has been enhanced significantly for Red Hat Linux
6.1. Shadow passwords are a method of improving system security by
moving the encrypted passwords (normally found in
/etc/passwd
) to another file with more restrictive
file access permissions. During the installation, you were given the
option of setting up shadow password protection on your system.
The
shadow-utils
package contains a number of
utilities that support:
-
Conversion from normal to shadowed passwords and back
(
pwconv
,
pwunconv
).
-
Verification of the password, group, and associated shadow files
(
pwck
,
grpck
).
-
Industry-standard methods of adding, deleting and modifying user
accounts (
useradd
,
usermod
,
and
userdel
).
-
Industry-standard methods of adding, deleting, and modifying user
groups (
groupadd
,
groupmod
,
and
groupdel
).
-
Industry-standard method of administering the
/etc/group
file (
gpasswd
).
Please Note:
There are a few additional points of interest concerning these
utilities:
-
The utilities will work properly whether shadowing is enabled or
not.
-
The utilities have been slightly modified to support Red Hat's
user private group scheme. For a description of the
modifications, please see the
useradd
man
page. For more information on user private groups, please turn
to
the section called
User Private Groups
.
-
The
adduser
script has been replaced with a
symlink to
/usr/sbin/useradd
.
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