Automated root passwords

[Mark Killen]

Hello, I am looking for suggestions. We have more than 30 HP servers and some sun servers in our shop. It is getting harder and harder to take the time to modify the passwords on a bi-monthly basis. Also if the password is recorded incorrectly we end up have to crash the server to recoer the password. Do any of my fellow admins know of a proven product or method of automating the root password changes of the systems.
Thanks

[Bill Hassell]

By using sudo and designing the sudoers file appropriately, you can eliminate the need for knowing the root password at all. Indeed, one technique for managing Unix systems is to generate a random password and change it every few minutes. Technically, setting all 30 machines to the same root password is in itself a security risk. The ideal situation is a unique (and on the surface, unrelated) password for every machine. The use of ssh between the machines is also a way to manage the systems with securely without having to login to each system with a password.

[Alan Meyer_4]

A while back I wrote a perl script to automatically modify the root passwords according to a special formula built into the script. Unfortunately, I do not have a copy of that script anymore, but, I do remember that it utilized the Unix::PasswdFile module found on CPAN to access and set the password.

Hope this helps a bit.

/a/

[Rick Garland]

An expect script works wonders!

You can download expect from the gatekeep.cs.utah.edu archives

Create a short script or look through google for 'passw changes + expect', there will be many hits.

With the expect script, you can issue a single command and it will chat to all of the systems and invoke the command.