CentOS - Sep 2007 - MD5 and NIS

Does anybody know whether it is possible to enable MD5 passwords for NIS and
local passwords? Is it just a matter of running

authconfig --enablemd5

and new passwords will use MD5 and old ones will still work?

Of course using LDAP might be a "better" solution (if it was easy to
install).

I've tried googling and didn't get any useful answers...

Jeremy

Jeremy Sanders wrote:
> Does anybody know whether it is possible to enable MD5 passwords for NIS
and
> local passwords? Is it just a matter of running
> 
> authconfig --enablemd5
> 
> and new passwords will use MD5 and old ones will still work?
Something I've never tried, but I don't think the NIS bit will work - 
you can have MD5 passwords in local /etc/passwd files and crypt 
passwords from NIS.

I believe NIS doesn't care what string of characters is used in the 
password field of the NIS passwd file, however user applications may. 
e.g. I think yppasswdd expects crypt strings to be passed about.

If Linux can use MD5 NIS passwords, then you might still have problems 
if you also have non-Linux NIS clients.

I guess the easiest way to test is to generate an MD5 passwd string and 
update your NIS source passwd file for a test user and see what happens ...

James Pearson