UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

I'm very new to UNIX (I just started working with Terminal 2 days ago) and I don't know the system very well.

I'm having trouble whenever I am asked for a password. I simply... can't type. I press keys on the keyboard but no characters appear on the screen. For example, when I log onto ftp.apple.com anonymously, I'm supposed to give my email as a password.

Code:

331 Anonymous login ok, send your complete email address as your password.
Password:(this is the part where I can't type anything)

I just can't type anything. A n y t h i n g. I can press "enter" (return) and it accepts it, but that doesn't really solve my overall problem.

And this happens everytime I am asked for my password. Like when I'm trying to log in to my own server space. Or trying to temporarily log in as a different user on my own computer using Terminal.

What's the deal?

in UNIX, generally, the keyboard input is not echoed to screen when typing a password; however the program will recieve the input as expected.
i'm not sure about the idea behind it, it might be intended to disable password output through stdout/stderr, or prevent peepers to learn how long your password is (this information is useful for brute for cracking).

Yeah that makes sense. But when I try to log into places where I know the password (i.e. my own server via sftp) I type in my password and it is not echoed, and when i hit return it claims that I haven't entered the correct password.

Argh!

Please help! I'm basically stuck now, I can't really move on with Unix if I don't know how to type in a password.

Have you gone throuhg the usual steps? i.e.:

- ensuring proper use of capitalized, numeric and special characters
- attempting to log in with a different client
- attempting to log into a different service (i.e.: ssh)
- Checking your client's character encoding settings
- Ensuring that the server is actually set up to accept anonymous connections. A few configurations I've seen will pretend that logging in anonymously works.

Chill. Bumping isn't among the most favoured of practices here, from what little I recall.

I am sure this has been brought up before, but people new to Unix may not be aware of it. There are two special characters that should be avoided at all costs when creating a password. This may not be the trouble you are running into, but it is worth knowing about later on.

The two characters are "@" and "#". These have special meanings in Unix. The problem is that often the password program will accept these characters when the password is created but won't recognize them later. In my case, a Unix Admin left the company and a former Windows Admin was told to change the root password. Being used to Windows, he created a password with an "@" in it. We found that we could log in from the console and from telnet, but we could not su (change user) to root and some remote connections did not work right. One server would not let us log in as root because it was using an older login program.

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