[gentoo-user] x or * in /etc/passwd ?

[gentoo-user] x or * in /etc/passwd ?

[Jorge Almeida]

I've seen somewhere a '*' in the password field of non-human users. I
think this is supposed to mean that user can't login. However, I didn't
find anything like that in gentoo's /etc/passwd (e.g., for user cron or
user sshd). Can someone comment on this matter? Is * deprecated? Of
course, these non-human users have /bin/false as shell, but extra
precautions wouldn't hurt...
Am I seeing something wrong?

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Jorge Almeida
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Re: [gentoo-user] x or * in /etc/passwd ?

[Matteo Pillon]

On Mon, Sep 18, 2006 at 10:09:03AM +0100, Jorge Almeida wrote:
> I've seen somewhere a '*' in the password field of non-human users. I
> think this is supposed to mean that user can't login. However, I didn't
> find anything like that in gentoo's /etc/passwd (e.g., for user cron or
> user sshd). Can someone comment on this matter? Is * deprecated? Of
> course, these non-human users have /bin/false as shell, but extra
> precautions wouldn't hurt...
> Am I seeing something wrong?

Passwords are stored in /etc/shadow for security reasons:
 -rw-r--r-- /etc/passwd
 -rw------- /etc/shadow

>From shadow(5) manpage:
If the password field contains some string that is not valid result of
crypt(3), for instance ! or *, the user will not be able to use a unix
password to log in, subject to pam(7).

Bye.

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 * Pillon Matteo
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Re: [gentoo-user] x or * in /etc/passwd ?

[Jorge Almeida]

On Mon, 18 Sep 2006, Matteo Pillon wrote:
>
> From shadow(5) manpage:
> If the password field contains some string that is not valid result of
> crypt(3), for instance ! or *, the user will not be able to use a unix
> password to log in, subject to pam(7).
>
OK, thank you. The * should appear in /etc/shadow, not in /etc/passwd.
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Jorge Almeida
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