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MLu
Asked: 2013-06-20 16:00:18 +0800 CST

One of my NIS users can't login - why?

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I've got an old Solaris 8 server as a client in a NIS domain. All users can login just fine except for one (user 'oracle'). It used to work but late last year "something" changed (I wasn't here at the time) and the user oracle can no longer login.

I can ssh to the server as oracle with rsa key, I can su to oracle from root, but anything involving password authentication fails for that single user. Logging on to other servers in the same NIS domain works so the password is certainly correct.

Any idea what's wrong? How to debug?

Edit: The user oracle isn't in /etc/passwd nor /etc/shadow. And /etc/nsswitch.conf has passwd files,nis. I also did "nscd -e passwd,no" to disable caching of passwd entries. "ypcat passwd" shows a record for oracle.

What else?

Thanks

solaris

2 Answers

  1. If oracle's password contains a non 7 bit ascii character, the cause might be a locale mismatch. eg: ISO-8859-xx vs UTF-8.

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  2. Best Answer

    Sorted. Problem was that the NIS password hash was in MD5 format ($1$xyz...) which isn't compatible with Solaris 8. We use a central password management and all password changes should default to DES hash but somehow someone managed to set the password as an MD5 hash.

    ~# ypmatch oracle passwd.adjunct.byname
oracle:$1$xyz...:::::::
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