From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0; Q312461) Description of problem: Creating a new user with redhat-config-users produces an encrypted password in /etc/shadow but not an MD5 encrypted password. Passwords later changed with the passwd command produce a password as per system defaults. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1. add a new user <username> with redhat-config-users and cat /etc/shadow | grep <username> 2. change password to the same password with passwd <username> and cat /etc/shadow | grep <username> 3. compare the results Actual Results: Original password will be encrypted as a 13 character string. Password created with passwd will be a 34 character MD5 string begining with $1 $. Expected Results: redhat-config-users should create an encrypted password identical to passwd as per the system settings. Additional info: My oldest system has 7.3 installed. Same behavior there.
The only way I can reproduce this is if I turn off "Use MD5 passwords" with authconfig. In which case, redhat-config-users is doing the right thing to not make MD5 encrypted passwords. However, on my test machine, 'passwd' does not make an MD5 password if MD5 passwords are disabled. Once I re-enable MD5 passwords with authconfig, both redhat-config-users and passwd start making MD5 passwords. I don't seem to be able to reproduce your problem.
Closing as 'worksforme'. The program seems to be working properly on my test machines.