What version of Fedora are you running here?  In the lab we've got some
Fedora 8 stuff and ssh was just a "turn this service on" type thing, I don't
ever remember being asked about shadow tables or anything like that.

-Jay

On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 2:04 PM, John Mort <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:

> On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 9:52 AM, Mike Kershaw <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> > On Tue, Mar 18, 2008 at 09:07:35AM -0400, John Mort wrote:
> >  > Poking around, I think I might have found the problem, but don't know
> >  > how to solve it.  On a whim I checked /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow,
> >  > /etc/passwd didn't show anything useful but /etc/shadow shows all the
> >  > user accounts passwords in plain text, while the root password is
> >  > obviously encrypted.  I've never (to my knowledge) used /etc/shadow,
> >  > but I'm guessing that ssh is checking this file and treating the
> >  > plaintext passwords as encrypted passwords, which would cause them to
> >  > not match up when it compares the encrypted version of what I'm
> typing
> >  > in.
> >
> >  Shadow has been around for about 10 years.  It solves the problem that
> a
> >  lot of nonprivved tools need to see the user accounts list, but
> >  shouldn't see the password list.  Passwords in /etc/passwd are
> >  "shadowed" with 'x' in the pw field.  The encrypted password is then
> >  kept in /etc/shadow, which should look like:
> >
> >  dragorn:$ddsfcxcvZFdjhdfjhxjjDEDFJhdfjhdf0:13775:0:99999:7:::
> >
> >  Shadow should definitely not show passwords in plaintext - that would
> >  indicate something has gone very wrong somewhere, I'm not even sure
> >  how you'd cause that to happen...
> >
> I just know that when I've been given the option at home to use shadow
> tables, I've declined, wanting to keep things simpler until I had a
> higher level of competency.
>
> With your confirmation that plaintext passwords in /etc/shadow are not
> normal, I was able to do a bit of googlemancy and I think I know what
> happened.
>
> It looks like the guy who set up the linux machines does everything in
> root, because even his account is showing up in plaintext. I just
> logged in as root and set myself up with a user account using the GUI
> and my password is encrypted. So I'm guessing he probably used the
> useradd command with the -p flag, which is supposed to be supplied
> with an encrypted password, but he probably put the password itself
> instead.  At least, that's how I'm able to replicate it.
>
> I'm not even able to log in locally under his name (which makes
> sense), so I'm betting he does everything as root and never noticed
> the problem before.
>
>
> --
> John D. Mort
> http://john.mort.net
> _______________________________________________
> Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group                  http://mhvlug.org
> http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug
> Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm)                         MHVLS Auditorium
>  Mar 5 - Wearable Linux Computing
>  Apr 2 - Building a Kernel the Debian / Ubuntu way
>  May 7 - Setting up a platform-independent home/small office network using
> Linux
>  Jun 4 - TBD
>  Jul 2 - KVM (Tenative)
>
_______________________________________________
Mid-Hudson Valley Linux Users Group                  http://mhvlug.org          
   
http://mhvlug.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/mhvlug                           
Upcoming Meetings (6pm - 8pm)                         MHVLS Auditorium          
        
  Mar 5 - Wearable Linux Computing
  Apr 2 - Building a Kernel the Debian / Ubuntu way
  May 7 - Setting up a platform-independent home/small office network using 
Linux
  Jun 4 - TBD
  Jul 2 - KVM (Tenative)

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