From owner-freebsd-questions Fri Jan 25 19:30:44 2002 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from tierzero.apana.org.au (sa.apana.org.au [203.14.158.1]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9741437B404 for ; Fri, 25 Jan 2002 19:30:40 -0800 (PST) Received: from BAPhD.gihon.org.au (dialup-8.pasa.apana.org.au [203.14.158.137]) by tierzero.apana.org.au (8.11.1/8.11.1) with SMTP id g0Q3Ttw02671 for ; Sat, 26 Jan 2002 13:59:55 +1030 (CST) (envelope-from bastill@sa.apana.org.au) Content-Type: text/plain; charset="iso-8859-1" From: Brian Astill Reply-To: bastill@sa.apana.org.au To: Subject: Re: A question from a convert from Windows to FreeBSD Date: Sat, 26 Jan 2002 14:00:24 +1030 X-Mailer: KMail [version 1.2] References: <0ffe01c1a371$661d1b20$6600640a@attbi.com> <02012512323903.01099@BAPhD.gihon.org.au> <02012421455703.07381@proxy.pt.com> In-Reply-To: <02012421455703.07381@proxy.pt.com> MIME-Version: 1.0 Message-Id: <02012614002402.01182@BAPhD.gihon.org.au> Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG On Friday 25 January 2002 13:15, Bill Moran wrote: > From your reaction, I'm guessing you have yet to discover the > built-in man pages I had a recent problem of somehow not being able to enter my system as user. I needed to change the me-as-user password and thought I would need to know the password FreeBSD was already holding in order to do this. I searched the man pages for passwd ypasswd etc etc, but NOWHERE could I find anything that told me how to make the change without knowing the existing password. When I asked on this list, the answer was somewhat embarrassing . However, what I am saying is that the simple sentence "passwords can be changed by root without knowledge of a users existing password" was simply not there on any man page - heaps and heaps of well-written detail I did not need, was. So just RTFM isn't any kind of solution for a newbie, who is likely to suffer information overload and STILL not find a solution to his or her problem. > Some > interesting places to start: > man man > man hier > man security > man tuning Will have a look at these. -- Regards, Brian To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message