From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.7) Gecko/20011226 Description of problem: When using 'vipw' to edit the password file (/etc/passwd) the man page states that vipw should do the necessary processing after the password file is unlocked. However, when I do a vipw and add a user, after exiting this user isn't known in the /etc/shadow file and therefor setting a passwd isn't working and the user won't be able to login. Using useradd works. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): vipw 1.4 from util-linux-2.11f-9 How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.Use vipw to edit the passwd file 2.Add a user 3.Check the /etc/shadow file. The new user isn't there Actual Results: User is defined in the passwd file, but not in the other files, resulting in a non working userid. Expected Results: The user should be defined in /etc/shadow, /etc/groups (if needed) I should end up with a normal working userid No /home/<userid>, /home/<userid>/<skeleton files> is fine, but not in the shadow file is not very handy. Additional info:
vipw is supposed to let you edit /etc/shadow as well as /etc/passwd, but nothing more. Does it not even do the edit?
Yes it does. I can do the edit, but normally (as under Solaris and FreeBSD) after editing the /etc/passwd file the new user is automatically added to the shadow file. This is what the man-page says that it should do, but it doesn't under RH7.2.
upgrade to the errata RPM -- util-linux-2.11f-17 running vipw w/ this RPM should prompt you to edit /etc/shadow. if necessary, vigr can then be run to edit /etc/group and /etc/gshadow.
The reporter is already aware of that ability - he is saying that he thinks the /etc/shadow entry should be automatically entered. I think the reason for this is because Solaris does it and he assumes that "necessary processing" should include adding /etc/shadow entries. I disagree (because I can conceive of a case where I would not want the /etc/shadow entry to be added, and because useradd is the appropriate tool to use if you want automatic processing type of stuff), so am marking it WONTFIX.