Bug 4077

When the password field is empty in /etc/passwd, passwd does
not add the encrypted passwd to the field, and it does not
indicate it with an error.

Here is the complete experiment:

# useradd okidoki
# grep okidoki /etc/passwd
okidoki:!!:519:520::/home/okidoki:/bin/bash
# emacs /etc/passwd         (empty password field)
# grep okidoki /etc/passwd
okidoki::519:520::/home/okidoki:/bin/bash
# passwd okidoki
Changing password for user okidoki
New UNIX password:                     (typed MaciLaci)
Retype new UNIX password:              (MaciLaci)
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully
root@moni: ~
# grep okidoki /etc/passwd
okidoki::519:520::/home/okidoki:/bin/bash

How can this be a problem (besides, that I think it is not a
correct behavior) since RH 6.0 does not let you log in w/o
an empty passwd field?


Well, imagine that on a yp server, after emptying the passwd
field, I run passwd (thinking passwd is set), then run

(cd /var/yp; make)

Now, on another older (5.2) RH box on the same NIS domain, I
could log in as okidoki w/o a passwd!  (I ran this
experiment with a 5.2 box as a yp server but passwd-0.58-1
and pwdb-0.58-3 installed).

Let me remark that yppasswd seems to behave correctly, but
linuxconf also gets confused (I guess it is running passwd).

Mate Wierdl