Cronjob for root password change. Post: 302903795

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Top Forums Shell Programming and Scripting Cronjob for root password change. Post 302903795 by Aia on Thursday 29th of May 2014 03:59:58 PM

05-29-2014

Registered User

Quote:

Originally Posted by nixhead

[...]But my concern is that user while having root access can read the real root password from cron, so is there is a possibility where I can avoid the hard-coding of root password, while still achieving the objective.

Quite often we do not have a saying on the practices and polices of the systems we administrate. Most of the time, the circumstances are far from ideal.

Allow me to subject that you encrypt the password before hand. Even if they get the hash it cannot be reversed to find out what the password is.

chpasswd already allows you to accept the hash instead of the clear text

Use some utility to encrypt the password into a hash that match what you see in the /etc/shadow file.

I use perl

Code:

perl -e 'print crypt("Some_password_I_want","\$6\$random_string\$") . "\n"'

Change "Some_password_I_want" for the real password
Change "random_string" for truly some make-up string of characters, I think if I remember correctly there's a limit as how long.

That will produce an output like:

Quote:

$6$random_string$7XSl45SffAJzLhBeEC7sa8Xn0x6w/yWnYET1P7gDFW1ffivIpYzZ3jbISbTeBE1dJFIBKbW15PGUhRLXmDYQS

blue is the type of hash
red is the salt
green is the encrypted password

Then use it as:

Code:

echo 'root:$6$random_string$7XSl45SffAJzLhBeEC7sa8Xn0x6w/yWnYET1P7gDFW1ffivIpYzZ3jbISbTeBE1dJFIBKbW15PGUhRLXmDYQS.' | chpasswd -e

It is important to use single quotes so the shell doesn't try to interpret all those $ as variables

Now, the password is not shown in the clear

Aia

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GRUB-RENDER-LABEL(1)                                               User Commands                                              GRUB-RENDER-LABEL(1)

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