wytten@cs.umn.edu (Dale R. Wyttenbach) (03/20/90)
I just realized that I had a user '+' with uid 0 on each of my machines, with no password. This must be because I followed the example of the niload man page and typed: niload passwd . < /etc/passwd The last line in /etc/passwd was '+', which is Sun for 'insert data from yellow-pages database here'. dale wyttenbach reluctant NeXT administrator wytten@cs.umn.edu
mark@Jhereg.Minnetech.MN.ORG (Mark H. Colburn) (03/20/90)
In article <1990Mar20.025019.6526@cs.umn.edu> wytten@cs.umn.edu (Dale R. Wyttenbach) writes: >I just realized that I had a user '+' with uid 0 on each of my >machines, with no password. >This must be because I followed the example of the niload man page >and typed: >niload passwd . < /etc/passwd >The last line in /etc/passwd was '+', which is Sun for 'insert >data from yellow-pages database here'. It is also quite possible that the line was inserted by vipw, if you used it to edit the passwd file in the first place. Vipw attempts to be more careful about how it handles passwd file updates to assure that the password information does not get lost, but it has some pretty nasty bugs that actually do worse things than it saves you from. Few people actually use it in a production environment. The symptom above is known to happen with some versions of vipw and Yellow Pages. -- Mark H. Colburn If you don't make money off of it, Open Systems Architects, Inc. it had better be either a religious mark@Minnetech.MN.ORG experience or a hobby. - Lance Cooper