Setting ROOTPW not properly documented in fai-guide?

[Michael Goetze]

Hi Henning,

> 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?

I don't know how you are expecting it to work. Did you copy the simple
examples and change nothing? If so, did you copy from a modern version
of fai-doc? And what exactly are you installing?

Grepping through the simple examples, I find

scripts/FAIBASE/10-misc:#echo "root:$ROOTPW" | $ROOTCMD chpasswd --encrypted
scripts/FAIBASE/10-misc:$ROOTCMD usermod -p $ROOTPW root

>From my own experience, "chpasswd --encrypted" doesn't necessarily work
right, you might want to check the chpasswd manpage in your target system.

Regards,
Michael