Date: Tue, 12 Aug 2003 09:00:40 -0700 (PDT) From: doug@allensystemconsultants.com To: freebsd-stable@freebsd.org Subject: password file recovery question Message-ID: <20030812090041.17518.h012.c011.wm@mail.allensystemconsultants.com.criticalpath.net>
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I've got a possibly silly question and I believe I have an answer, but I want to see if what I think is the answer is feasible. I've had to rebuild a mail server from scratch, upgrading from 4.6-STABLE to 4.8-STABLE in the process. The other mail server had crashed, with disk errors so sever it wouldn't fsck clean. I was able to get it together enough to pull my configuration files off the old server. I was even able to get the master.passwd file off of it. When I rebuilt, I added users one at a time, so directories, etc. were there. But then I copied the master.passwd file from the previous server over the new master.passwd file and most of the passwords were scrambled. Is it impossible to use the old master.passwd file when picking up the pieces of the old server on the new server? If it isn't impossible, under what conditions can one reuse the file contents? I had all the UID's and GID's identical when I entered users, so that isn't the problem. I'm wondering if it's the hashing of the password that is the problem? Different system, different key and seed, different hash results for the same string of characters, so the passwords are scrambled for most users. If I could keep the keys and the hashes identical, then the passwords wouldn't get scrambled is one idea I've had running around. It wouldn't be an issue, except that I have about 1000 users and not all of them are good about getting back to me on issues. I did notice that if I already have passwords set before I copy the master.passwd file over, those users seem to retain the password set when I created them with adduser. So my password, another user who helps me test, and root weren't scrambled. Thanks for any information you may be able to provide. Doug Allen Doug Allen Allen System Consultants
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