perl COPS, one line patch; apply or it dies...

Dan Farmer df at sei.cmu.edu
Sun Jun 23 23:23:57 AEST 1991


  (I forgot to crosspost this from alt.sources.)

  I forgot to take out my test password file, and comment out a
critical line in the configuration file, "cops.cf".  There is a line,
26, I think, that looks like this:

$GET_PASSWD = '/bin/cat passwd';

  It should be either commented out, or deleted, if you don't want
it there.  You will get bogus results, unless you do (unless you
happen to copy your own password file in the directory you're
running cops from.)  The purpose of this is to check alternate password
files, whether from other machines, shadow password files, or whatever.
For instance, as a poor example, if you use NIS/yellow pages, you could
say:

$GET_PASSWD = 'ypcat passwd';

  And all the password stuff would work on your yp database instead
of the normal one in /etc/passwd.  This is a poor example, because 
the system automatically detects yellow pages, and does this anyway.
But hopefully, you get the idea.  Anyway, just comment out that
line, or apply this patch that will do it for you.

 --dan

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
*** cops.cf.old	Sun Jun 23 01:16:47 1991
--- cops.cf	Sun Jun 23 01:22:56 1991
***************
*** 23,29 ****
  # and 'ypcat passwd' stuff.  Note that this will pass the info to the
  # password caching program -- it expects a file with *exactly* the same
  # fields and such as the normal password file, ok?
! $GET_PASSWD	= '/bin/cat passwd';
  
  ###############################################################
  # many things call &chk_strings (including {cron,misc,rc,root}.chk)
--- 23,29 ----
  # and 'ypcat passwd' stuff.  Note that this will pass the info to the
  # password caching program -- it expects a file with *exactly* the same
  # fields and such as the normal password file, ok?
! # $GET_PASSWD	= '/bin/cat passwd';
  
  ###############################################################
  # many things call &chk_strings (including {cron,misc,rc,root}.chk)



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