Setting ROOTPW not properly documented in fai-guide?

[Toomas Tamm]

Hello!

I can confirm that it works at least under FAI 3.1.8 (etch). I prepare
my encrypted passwords from the plain text with

makepasswd --clearfrom $PLAINFILE --crypt-md5 --randomseed NNNNNNN | awk '{ print $2 }'

(NNNNNN is an integer)

and store them in a closely guarded file. During FAI installation one of
my .var scripts extracts the correct encrypted password from that file
and sets ROOTPW to the value.

The actual password setting occurs in scripts/FAIBASE/10-misc (from the
sample scripts which came with FAI) and the corresponding lines are

# set root password
echo "root:$ROOTPW" | $ROOTCMD chpasswd --encrypted

Maybe you have modified that script, or it is not run at all in your
setup?

Toomas


On Thu, 2010-02-25 at 14:28 +0100, Henning Sprang wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> When trying to figure out hot to change the default rootpassword of
> installed clients by just changing the variable "ROOTPW" in a class
> .var file,
> I believe that the information in the fai-guide and comments in the
> configs is not helpful to get a new password.
> 
> The only things I found that worked is
> 
> * copying a password value from a real /etc/shadow file
> * using mkpasswd as written in
> http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-fai@uni-koeln.de/msg00210.html
> 
> Both of these ways are not documented in the FAI-guide, and the hint
> on crypt or md5 in the guide/comments would lead me to use the crypt
> command (in the mcrypt package) or the md5sum command - both did not
> work for me.
> 
> any experiences with this, or other ways how to do that?
> 
> Henning
> 
>