On the Solaris operating system, the nispasswd command changes NIS+ password information.

Description

The nispasswd utility changes a password, gecos field (-g option), home directory (-h option), or login shell (-s option) associated with the username (by default, whoever invoked the program) in the NIS+ passwd table.

  • Description
  • Syntax
  • Exit status
  • Warning
  • Related commands
  • Linux commands help

Additionally, the command can view or modify aging information associated with the user specified if the invoker has the right NIS+ privileges.

nispasswd uses secure RPC to communicate with the NIS+ server, and therefore, never sends unencrypted passwords over the communication medium.

nispasswd does not read or modify the local password information stored in the /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow files.

When used to change a password, nispasswd prompts non-privileged users for their old password. It then prompts for the new password twice to forestall typing mistakes. When the old password is entered, nispasswd checks to see if it has “aged” sufficiently. If “aging” is insufficient, nispasswd terminates.

The old password is used to decrypt the username’s secret key. If the password does not decrypt the secret key, nispasswd prompts for the old secure-RPC password. It uses this password to decrypt the secret key. If this fails, it gives the user one more chance. The old password is also used to ensure the new password differs from the old by at least three characters. Assuming aging is sufficient, a check is made to ensure the new password meets construction requirements described below. When the new password is entered a second time, the two copies of the new password are compared. If the two copies are not identical, the cycle of prompting for the new password is repeated twice. The new password is used to re-encrypt the user’s secret key. Hence, it also becomes their secure-RPC password. Therefore, the secure-RPC password is no longer a different password from the user’s password.

Passwords must be constructed to meet the following requirements:

  • Each password must have at least six characters. Only the first eight characters are significant.
  • Each password must contain at least two alphabetic characters and at least one numeric or special character. In this case, “alphabetic” refers to all uppercase or lowercase letters.
  • Each password must differ from the user’s login username and any reverse or circular shift of that login username. For comparison purposes, an uppercase letter and its corresponding lowercase letter are equivalent.
  • New passwords must differ from the old password by at least three characters. For comparison purposes, an uppercase letter and its corresponding lowercase letter are equivalent.

Network administrators, who own the NIS+ password table, may change any password attributes if they establish their credentials (see keylogin) before invoking nispasswd. Hence, nispasswd does not prompt these privileged-users for the old password and they are not forced to comply with password aging and password construction requirements.

Any user may use the -d option to display password attributes for their login name. The format of the display is:

username status mm/dd/yy min max warn

or, if password aging information is not present:

username status

where the following values are used:

Syntax

nispasswd [-ghs] [-D domainname] [username]

nispasswd -a

nispasswd [-D domainname] [-d[username]]

nispasswd [-l] [-f] [-n min] [-x max] [-w warn] [-D domainname] username

Options

nispasswd recognizes the following options:

Exit status

Warning

The use of nispasswd is STRONGLY discouraged. Even though it is a hard link to passwd, its operation is subtly different and not desirable in a modern NIS+ domain.

In particular, nispasswd does not attempt to contact the rpc.nispasswdd daemon running on the NIS+ master. It instead attempts to do the updates by itself via the NIS+ API. For this to work, the permissions on the password data need to be modified from the default as set up by the nisserver setup script.

Using passwd with the -r nisplus option achieves the same result and is consistent across all the different name services available. This is the recommended way to change the password in NIS+.

The login program, file access display programs (for example, ’ls -l’), and network programs that require user passwords (for example, rlogin, ftp, and so on) use the standard getpwnam and getspnam interfaces to get password information. These programs get the NIS+ password information, that is modified by nispasswd, only if the “passwd:” entry in the /etc/nsswitch.conf file includes nisplus.

keylogin — Decrypt a user’s secret key on SunOS.login — Begin a session on a system.nistbladm — Administer NIS+ tables.passwd — Change a user’s password.rlogin — Begin a session on a remote system.