Q: passwd command for user prompts for another user's password to be changed

From: Tim Chipman (tchipman@gmail.com)
Date: Tue Aug 29 2006 - 09:24:37 EDT


Hi All,

a somewhat odd / disturbing thing that I've never seen and gives some pause:

Just was setting up a new user (call them "userA") on a small sunray server
here. We logged in to the account on a sunray for the first time using the
default password I had set (local password auth against /etc/passwd and
shadow files)

opened a terminal, and typed "passwd" so that we could set a new password of
the user's choosing.

it then told me,

---paste---

userA@SunRay[~]> passwd
passwd: Changing password for userX
Permission denied
userA@SunRay[~]> whoami
userA

---endpaste---

I later went back and opened another terminal window, re-ran the passwd
command and got what I expected .. ie...

--paste--

userA@SunRay[~]> passwd
passwd: Changing password for userA
..etc....proceeds normally...
userA@SunRay[~]> whoami
userA

--endpaste--

I'm familiar with the idea, if I su to root and then issue "passwd" command
on this machine, it will change <my user password> and not the root password
- unless I specifically state "passwd root" (for example). However, the
fact that passwd tried to change another user password .. suggests? that it
thought it was someone else .. ?

It is just odd behaviour.

the machine in question is runn solaris 8, not very recently patched (to put
it mildly):

---paste---
root@SunRay[/etc]# uname -a
SunOS SunRay 5.8 Generic_108528-22 sun4u sparc SUNW,Sun-Fire

root@SunRay[/etc]# cat /etc/release
                       Solaris 8 10/01 s28s_u6wos_08a SPARC
           Copyright 2001 Sun Microsystems, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
                           Assembled 12 September 2001
---paste----

I've trawled the group archives, google ... to no avail .. possibly this is
a known issue and I'm just missing it ..

any comments on this are greatly appreciated.

--Tim Chipman
_______________________________________________
sunmanagers mailing list
sunmanagers@sunmanagers.org
http://www.sunmanagers.org/mailman/listinfo/sunmanagers



This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.7 : Wed Apr 09 2008 - 23:40:41 EDT