Logging On Help

[Joe(theWordy)Philbrook]

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It would appear that on Jul 9, Shadow did say:

> Hi Everyone......things are seemingly going well with learning Fedora
> Core 2, but today, I ran into a problem and don't know where to begin to
> resolve it or what caused the problem in the first place.  I can't seem
> to log on to a user account that I created for myself. I can, however,
> sign on as root. The error message says that I am using an incorrect
> username or password.  I DO know that I am using the correct username and
> password and I did check to make sure Capslock wasn't on and that I was
> using the correct letter case.  So I delete the account....including the
> home directory and recreated the account.  The same thing.....been
> working on this one all day.  Can someone tell me what is wrong or point
> me to the right direction to solve this problem?


Just a guess here... some user creating tools appear to allow you to set
the new user's password during the process. but actually require that
you feed them the encrypted password that is actually stored in the 
restricted access file "/etc/shadow".

Note this snippage from the useradd man page:

=>   -p passwd
=>           The encrypted password, as returned by crypt(3).  The default is
=>           to disable the account.


When you enter the normal password during login or with the passwd
command your plain text password is encrypted and the results compared
against the etc/shadow copy.

The usual way to get around this is for root to create the account for
a newuser, then at the command prompt root uses passwd to set the user
password

- -> [root at localhost jtwdyp]# passwd newuser
- -> Changing password for user newuser.
- -> New password:
- -> Retype new password:
- -> passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully.
- -> [root at localhost jtwdyp]#

This was something I had a hard time understanding until I carefully
copied the encrypted version of a known password from /etc/shadow and
pasted it into the -p argument to useradd for a test account, and
discovered that the test user did in fact get the known password.

Good luck!

- -- 
|   ~^~   ~^~
|   <*>   <*>	   Joe (theWordy) Philbrook
|	^		  J(tWdy)P
|     \___/	     <<jtwdyp at ttlc.net>>

But if I actually knew everything, then I'd know I was an idiot...

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