jw@pan.UUCP (Jamie Watson) (02/20/89)
In the past week, I have upgraded my RT/PC to AIX 2.2.1, and the X on it to the IBM 2.1 release. Overall it is a major improvement; IBM continues to do a lot of good things with AIX on the RT. I have run into one problem, however, which is due as much as anything to the fact that the software and documentation are shipped from two different places in Europe, so I don't have the manual updates yet. The new AIX release contains a complete "shadow password file". In view of the recent security concerns, this seems to be a good idea, and the AIX implementation looks very good to me. However, I have so far only figured out that the "passwd" command causes the shadow file to get updated; I can't find any other way to force it to happen. Is there some other command that will do this? In hopes of saving someone some confusion, here is what happened. In the process of upgrading the operating system, I used and editor to cut the root definition out of my old /etc/passwd file, and inserted it in the new file. Of course, the passwd file on the distribution had to password for root. After finishing the editing, I logged out, and then logged back in. Much to my surprise, I didn't get prompted for a password!?! I checked /etc/passwd, made sure that there was a password there for root, made sure there were no other lines in it for root... logged out, logged in, still no password required. I finally found the shadow file, and figured out what was going on. jw