Password Incompatibilties

[David Moline]

I just ran into a problem which I thought was interesting enough to tell
others about. But first a bit of background.

In the past there have benn no problems transferring passwd files around
between various flavours of Suns (I must admit I haven't tested this on a
386i) and Solbournes and various OS releases, it is simply a matter of
copying the old/global passwd file around and away everyone goes using
there old passwords.  Although I don't use it, I guess this is why rdist
is used so much.

Anyway now with SunOS 4.1 the passwd command has options for aging and
expiring passwords (IMHO this is a great feature). However to do this the
extra information is stored next to the encrypted passwd making that field
about 5 characters longer. Machines running 4.1 and above can happily
handle this extra large field, but pre 4.1 machines, cannot handle the
extra length and will always fail login attempts (the extra chars work the
same way the * does to disable login access).  I dont know how machines
using NIS/yellow pages will cope as I am not running that here.  Here
follows two password entries one with the aging feature and one without.
The first will work on any Sun/Solbourne with any OS release, and the
second will only work with OS release 4.1 or greater (BTW the encrypted
passwd is passwd if you want to try this one out):

gcs:1pkuYe7oxCrQ2:300:300:Graphics Comp. Systems:/usr2/guest/gcs:/bin/csh
gcs:1pkuYe7oxCrQ2,3.6F:300:300:Graphics Comp. Systems:/usr2/guest/gcs:/bin/csh
                  ^^^^
                   aging/expiry information

David Moline                  - Graphics Computer Systems
                                Email: drm at gaia.gcs.oz.au