[320] in NetBSD-Development
Re: Some notes on installation
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Greg Hudson)
Wed Dec 28 03:04:01 1994
To: yoav@MIT.EDU
Cc: ghudson@MIT.EDU, netbsd-dev@MIT.EDU
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Wed, 28 Dec 1994 02:34:33 EST."
<9412280734.AA03461@marinara.MIT.EDU>
Date: Wed, 28 Dec 1994 03:03:54 -0500
From: Greg Hudson <ghudson@MIT.EDU>
> Well, while working on login, one of the things I had to crack was
> the master.passwd and family of files (including the dbm databases
> of the password files) I can write a short program to generate
> everything from any of these if you like..., although there is a
> command to turn the master.passwd file into the other three, so
> perhaps the paswwd.local should be a madster passwd file instead?
Whatever scheme we choose has to deal with the following issues:
* A standard method for adding local password entries is
hesinfo username passwd >>/etc/passwd.local
although this doesn't work under AIX. It would be nice to
have something at least as easy work. In our current
scheme, the above command works.
* Can you change root's password with "passwd root", using the
standard /usr/bin/passwd? In our current scheme, this
doesn't work (and neither does the Athena scheme; they have
a customized /bin/passwd on Decstations, for instance).
* Do the system password files accumulate lots of cruft after
lots of logins by randoms? Neither our current scheme nor
Athena's has this property, but the base operating system
utilities do.
After some thought, I think the best scheme is to eliminate the
concepts of /etc/passwd.local and /etc/group.local. When temporary
accounts are added to /etc/master.passwd and /etc/passwd, they will be
tagged as temporary (I currently favor a password field of *temp*).
When reactivate runs, it will clean out all the temporary accounts and
their corresponding entries in /etc/group.
To add a local password entry, you will have to do:
hesinfo username passwd \
| sed 's/^\([^:]*:[^:]*:[^:]*:[^:]*:\)\(.*\)$/\1:0:0:\2/' \
>> /etc/master.passwd
which should obviously be a script in /usr/athena/etc. In case you
were wondering, there is no "adduser" or "useradd" script in NetBSD as
far as I can tell.
This requires writing some software. In the meantime, I will modify
the installation script not to create an /etc/passwd.local file, to
avoid overwriting people's root passwords.
One more issue: where did the terminal type "vt225" come from? I ask,
because it's not stock NetBSD 1.0, and virtual consoles should
probably be labeled as having 24 lines, not 25, since that's where the
scrolling takes place.
