Password Incompatibilties

[Technician]

David Moline writes

>extra information is stored next to the encrypted passwd making that field
>about 5 characters longer. Machines running 4.1 and above can happily

What David is not aware of, as he's not running NIS, is that it is also
NIS incompatable, ie yppasswd will not recognise the modified encrypted
passwd.  From looking at the source of an earlier version of yppasswd, the
only real changes that seem to be needed are the strcmp, making it strncmp
so it does not attempt to include the ageing information, and then
modifying the ageing information appended to the encrypted password field
- so anyone with the source of the current version (4.1) prepared to hack
up yppasswd to make it do what SUN intended, then a good idea can become a
real option.

Jim Cottrell, Software Technician.