RHEL Engineering is moving the tracking of its product development work on RHEL 6 through RHEL 9 to Red Hat Jira (issues.redhat.com). If you're a Red Hat customer, please continue to file support cases via the Red Hat customer portal. If you're not, please head to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira and file new tickets here. Individual Bugzilla bugs in the statuses "NEW", "ASSIGNED", and "POST" are being migrated throughout September 2023. Bugs of Red Hat partners with an assigned Engineering Partner Manager (EPM) are migrated in late September as per pre-agreed dates. Bugs against components "kernel", "kernel-rt", and "kpatch" are only migrated if still in "NEW" or "ASSIGNED". If you cannot log in to RH Jira, please consult article #7032570. That failing, please send an e-mail to the RH Jira admins at rh-issues@redhat.com to troubleshoot your issue as a user management inquiry. The email creates a ServiceNow ticket with Red Hat. Individual Bugzilla bugs that are migrated will be moved to status "CLOSED", resolution "MIGRATED", and set with "MigratedToJIRA" in "Keywords". The link to the successor Jira issue will be found under "Links", have a little "two-footprint" icon next to it, and direct you to the "RHEL project" in Red Hat Jira (issue links are of type "https://issues.redhat.com/browse/RHEL-XXXX", where "X" is a digit). This same link will be available in a blue banner at the top of the page informing you that that bug has been migrated.

Description of problem:

According to man login.defs, ENCRYPT_METHOD=SHA512 overrides MD5_CRYPT_ENAB.

Manually changing ENCRYPT_METHOD to MD5 does not change the system to use MD5 hashed password.

Using 'system-config-authentication' or 'authconfig --enablemd5 --update' to change to MD5, adds to /etc/login.defs the MD5_CRYPT_ENAB=yes. And then MD5 works.



Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):

RHEL 6.0, 6.1, 6.2

How reproducible:

100%

Steps to Reproduce:
1.
2.
3.
  
Actual results:

passwd <user> creates a $6$ hashed password in /etc/shadow

Expected results:

passwd <user> should create a $1$ hashed password in /etc/shadow

Additional info:

It looks that something is missing from the man page of login.defs

login.defs(5) is man page in shadow-utils package. Reassigning to the correct component.

This request was evaluated by Red Hat Product Management for
inclusion in the current release of Red Hat Enterprise Linux.
Because the affected component is not scheduled to be updated
in the current release, Red Hat is unable to address this
request at this time.

Red Hat invites you to ask your support representative to
propose this request, if appropriate, in the next release of
Red Hat Enterprise Linux.

Actually the reason why the authconfig call is needed is that not only login.defs has to be set but - for the passwd program especially - the system PAM configuration in /etc/pam.d/system-auth must be changed. And that is what authconfig does. The MD5_CRYPT_ENAB in login.defs is legacy and not needed.