now, HP can be very annoying when your coming off of a solaris box. anyway, i needed to change a password for a user who was on an HP machine. Changing the password was no problem but getting the user to log on with the new password was the problem.

the user kept getting "account disabled" messages.

my question is, what is the exact command that could have saved me the headache? what is that command that could have enabled the damn account? mind you, this is an HP-UX Machine.

Check to see if there is a entry at the bottom of the /etc/passwd file that locks out the group this particular user is in (if NIS is being used). See the man page on passwd (Section 4)
(extract from that man page)

Here is a sample /etc/passwd file:

root:3Km/o4Cyq84Xc:0:10:System Administrator:/:/sbin/sh
joe:r4hRJr4GJ4CqE:100:50:Joe User,Post 4A,12345:/home/joe:/usr/bin/k
sh
+john:
-bob:
+@documentation:no-login:
-@marketing:
+:::Guest

In this example, there are specific entries for users root and joe, in
case the Network Information System are out of order.

+ User john's password entry in the Network Information System
is incorporated without change.
...
+ The password field for anyone in the netgroup documentation
is disabled.

+ Users in netgroup marketing are not returned by getpwent(3C)
and thus are not allowed to log in.


And I'm sure Solaris is annoying to folks who know HP-UX.