Samba 2.0.3 logins fail with unix password > 8 chars (PR#14551)

Jeremy Allison jallison at cthulhu.engr.sgi.com
Tue Mar 9 19:24:22 GMT 1999


> A user on our HPUX box creates a new 11 character password.  HPUX silently
> drops the last three chars and accepts the new password.  The user, being
> unaware of the 8 char limit assumes their password is actually 11 chars
> long.  Now, when they try to connect to a share on the HP from their NT4
> box, they type the "full" 11 chars of their password only to be greeted with
> a Bad Password message.  If on the other hand, they type ONLY THE FIRST 8
> characters of the password, it succeeds!  This is rather strange since the
> system itself ignores the extra characters.
> 
> What changed in v2.0.3 to cause this behaviour?  Is there an config option
> to change it?  I've looked through the documentation but can't find anything
> that might help.

Actually, Steve Fosdick (fosdicsj at aom.bt.co.uk) has tracked
down this exact issue (I'm *very* grateful Steve, thanks).

The problem is that, as you say, the standard HPUX auth
mechanism is a crypt that truncates at 8 characters.
Unfortunately autoconf detects that HPUX has "bigcrypt"
(the <8 character crypt) available to it, and so uses
bigcrypt by default. The output from bigcrypt is obviously
going to be different from crypt with greater than 8 char
passwords.

Steve got around this in his compile by running configure
and then manually #undef'ing the HAVE_BIGCRYPT lines in 
config.h.

What we need is an autoconf test to determine if an HPUX
system is actually set up to use bigcrypt in the /etc/passwd
or /etc/shadow files and turn off bigcrypt accordingly.

Anyone here from HP who has an idea how to code this test ?

Cheers,

	Jeremy Allison,
	Samba Team.

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