Am I going crazy? I installed Red Hat 6.0 (`Everything'), all was well, I logged in as root on the console, typed passwd operator to enable a non-root account, it said passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully but /etc/passwd didn't actually change, the password was still *. I tried several different passwords. I did not enable MD5 passwords or NIS+ on the new setup screen at the end. This is not peculiar to operator. For example, I just tried passwd bin (another account with a * password), used jac:jil! for the password, and /etc/passwd didn't change despite the success message.
Change the password field from '*' to '!!' and you will be able to change the password.
This is not reasonable. No other unix does anything this stupid. Root using passwd to change the entry should ALWAYS work, no matter the existing contents. WHAT THE HELL WERE YOU THINKING?
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 5005 ***