Change location password

[Gabriele FACCHINI]

Hi all,
can i to change location of the passord to another file unless start trusted system?
Thanks for your interest.
Gabriele

[John Carr_2]

yes you can but why ?

you cold do this

cp passwd passwd.old
mv passwd /tmp/passwd
ln -s /tmp/passwd passwd

the password now resides in the tmp directory but is still seen by programs to be in the /etc directory

john.

[Gabriele FACCHINI]

Is it possible to move only the password to another file and leave the other information in the passwd file?

[John Carr_2]

Hi

moving the encrypted password from the password file is exactly what making the system trusted does with it.

the password file is readable so people copy them to other serves and run crack to gain password.

trusted systems have password in file which can only be read by root - stops problem.

John.

[John Carr_2]

Hi

of course if you just which to extract the password and put it into another file you can do

cat passwd awk -F: '{ print $2}' > /tmp/filename


john.

[Deepak Extross]

Hi,
I think you are referring to a shadow password file.
See http://docs.hp.com/cgi-bin/fsearch/framedisplay?top=/hpux/onlinedocs/5965-4406/5965-4406_top.html&con=/hpux/onlinedocs/5965-4406/00/01/108-con.html&toc=/hpux/onlinedocs/5965-4406/00/01/108-toc.html&searchterms=shadow%20password&queryid=20020408-033255

[Gabriele FACCHINI]

I have HP-UX 11.0, and I want, if it is possible, to change location only of the password, unless to activate trusted system.
thanks.

[Steve Lewis]

It sounds like you don't want trusted mode, but still want to move your encrypted password out of /etc/passwd.
Access to lines in the password file are made using system calls such as getpwent(), see man getpwent.
I don't think you will be able to change the /etc/passwd file format because of the restrictions of these calls, which are part of the HP-UX o/s source. I know, since I have had to maintain the source to programs login/su/passwd myself. These programs use getpwent().

You are therefore restricted to HPUX trusted mode or HPUX 'normal' with the given file format.

You may still want to investigate PAM or Pluggagle Authentication Modules.

[harry d brown jr]

Gabriele,

If you don't make your system "trusted" then you CAN NOT just move the "passwords" out of the /etc/passwd file. If you remove those password entries in your /etc/passwd file, then those users for which you modified will not be able to ever login again.

Are you concerned about someone running the "crack" program? If you are, then I suggest you keep all users out of shells and in their applications.

Otherwise you should convert to a trusted system.


live free or die
harry