Re: usersgroups - passwd functionality

[Stew Benedict <sbenedict@mandrakesoft.com>]

On Fri, 7 Sep 2001, Christopher Yeoh wrote:

> Hi Stew,
> 
> Stew Benedict writes:
> > 
> > The usersgroups implentation of "passwd", while inline with the LSB spec,
> > does not seem to correspond to any version of the application that I'm
> > able to find.  On RedHat based systems, with shadow and pam, some of the
> > specified functionality is performed by the commands "chage" and
> > "gpasswd".
> 
> Which specific testcases are you seeing problems with?  (btw I think
> that passwd just execs gpasswd for some functionality - which is still
> a valid implementation, just applications won't call gpasswd directly)
> 

Any of the aging commands (-x, -i, -n, -w) as well as the group passwd
functionality. The version Mandrake uses is:

[stew@powerbook-cooker gi]$ rpm -qi passwd
Name        : passwd                       Relocations: (not relocateable)
Version     : 0.64.1                            Vendor: MandrakeSoft

And these are the only options available:

[stew@powerbook-cooker gi]$ passwd --help Usage: passwd [OPTION...]
<accountName>
  -d, --delete          delete the password for the named account (root
only)
  -f, --force           force operation

  -k, --keep-tokens     keep non-expired authentication tokens
  -l, --lock            lock the named account (root only)
  -S, --status          report password status on the named account (root
only)
  --stdin               read new tokens from stdin (root only)
  -u, --unlock          unlock the named account (root only)

Help options
  -?, --help            Show this help message
  --usage               Display brief usage message

I actually also wrote a small wrapper script that passed things off to
chage and gpasswd and that picked up a few of the failures, although 
the group password setting still failed. Put this in
/usr/local/bin/passwd. Sort of a kludge though.

> > Is it expected that "paaswd" be re-written to conform to the spec, or can
> > someone point me to source of a compliant version?
> 
> The spec was written based on the shadow package source. I don't
> remember the exact site it came from, but could be one of the
> following:
> 
> ftp://piast.t19.ds.pwr.wroc.pl/pub/linux/shadow/
> ftp://ftp.ists.pwr.wroc.pl/pub/linux/shadow/
> http://www.itnet.pl/amelektr/linux/shadow/
> 
> The spec actually requires a subset of the functionality listed in the
> man page (but providing more is ok as long as it doesn't contradict
> the spec).
> 

Thank's I'll check out those sources.

Also, as an aside.  Running the test sequentially, my failures increase if
I don't manually groupdel vsx5 before another run.  

Also I had to add /usr/sbin to vsx0's path as the group* and user*
commands reside there in Mandrake - is this valid? I could alternately 
push to move the apps or symlink them.

There also seems to be an issue with the addition of user vsx5, when the
group already exists, without specifying a group.

[root@mdk80 /root]# useradd vsx5
useradd: group vsx5 exists - if you want to add this user to that group, 
use -g.  

That failing, a number of subsequent tests don't happen.

Thanks,
Stew Benedict