Very Computer

I have a network setup for a student lab here in a University in Sweden.
Many of the students have Swedish Characters in their gecos fields.
When one of the students that has swedish characters in his/her gecos fields
tries to update his password it sais that the Update was unsuccesful and then
all subsequent attempts to update a password by any student on that machine
fail (even if they don't have swedish characters in their gecos fields.)

The following is an excerpt from /var/log/messages:
Jan 27 16:50:00 elab-srv yppasswdd[260]: Invalid characters in gecos argument: "vrgen "Zigge" Sigvardsson"
Jan 27 16:50:00 elab-srv yppasswdd[260]: update di5sig (uid=520) from host 193.10.221.198 failed
Jan 27 16:50:53 elab-srv yppasswdd[260]: update di5sean (uid=564) from host 193.10.221.198 rejected

'vrgen in the first line is really '?rgen' so I am assuming that it is
the swedish character that is causing problems. As you can see for the
last line with the user 'di5sean' other updates are now rejected. I am
assuming that going in and chaning all the Swedish characters to ASCII
characters will solve this problem, but I was hoping that this is a known
problem that has a more elegant solution.

------------

The second problem that I am having is that I can not change the users
password using yppasswd as root. When I type 'yppasswd usernamehere'
I get a prompt for the users password, the reason I am changing the
password to begin with is that the user has forgot the password.
If I try to enter the superuser password it rejects it. If I enter
the correct old password for the user it works, however. According
to the man pages it would seem that it should work. I would rather
not have to come up with my own program to change user passwords
in the distributed password files since I am not sure how yppasswdd
deals with password updates, and there is a chance that race conditions
could occur.

I am using:
yppasswd 0.9
yppasswdd 0.9
ypserv 1.1.7

This is all running on Linux 2.0.30, RedHat 4.2 distribution.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Sean Kendall Schneyer
Elab System Administrator
--
Sean Kendall Schneyer                   Tel: +46 (0)54 885029
Computer Science Department             Fax: +46 (0)54 838446

S-651 88 Karlstad Sweden                URL: http://www.cs.hks.se/~sean/

Hello,

: I have a network setup for a student lab here in a University in Sweden.
: Many of the students have Swedish Characters in their gecos fields.
: When one of the students that has swedish characters in his/her gecos fields
: tries to update his password it sais that the Update was unsuccesful and then
: all subsequent attempts to update a password by any student on that machine
: fail (even if they don't have swedish characters in their gecos fields.)
:
: The following is an excerpt from /var/log/messages:
: Jan 27 16:50:00 elab-srv yppasswdd[260]: Invalid characters in gecos argument: "vrgen "Zigge" Sigvardsson"
: Jan 27 16:50:00 elab-srv yppasswdd[260]: update di5sig (uid=520) from host 193.10.221.198 failed
: Jan 27 16:50:53 elab-srv yppasswdd[260]: update di5sean (uid=564) from host 193.10.221.198 rejected
:
: 'vrgen in the first line is really '?rgen' so I am assuming that it is
: the swedish character that is causing problems. As you can see for the
: last line with the user 'di5sean' other updates are now rejected. I am
: assuming that going in and chaning all the Swedish characters to ASCII
: characters will solve this problem, but I was hoping that this is a known
: problem that has a more elegant solution.

Please try it again with the new rpc.yppasswdd from ypserv 1.2.8. This
will tell you, why the update was rejected. There are many reasons.

rpc.yppasswdd uses iscntrl to find not allowed characters. iscntrl
is using your LOCALE settings.

:
: ------------
:
: The second problem that I am having is that I can not change the users
: password using yppasswd as root. When I type 'yppasswd usernamehere'
: I get a prompt for the users password, the reason I am changing the
: password to begin with is that the user has forgot the password.
: If I try to enter the superuser password it rejects it. If I enter
: the correct old password for the user it works, however. According
: to the man pages it would seem that it should work. I would rather
: not have to come up with my own program to change user passwords
: in the distributed password files since I am not sure how yppasswdd
: deals with password updates, and there is a chance that race conditions
: could occur.

You should get ypserv 1.2.8 from ftp.kernel.org. There is a configure flag,
so that you could change a users password with the root password from
the NIS master server. To allow the root password from a client is a very
bad idea. But before upgrading to ypserv 1.2.8, read the README ! There
were some bigger changes between ypserv 1.1.x and 1.2.x.

If you have the same problems with the GECOS field and the rpc.yppasswdd
from the ypserv 1.2.8 package, please send me an email, then we should
try to fix it.

  Thorsten

--

                http://www-vt.uni-paderborn.de/~kukuk/
Linux is like a Vorlon.  It is incredibly powerful, gives terse,
cryptic answers and has a lot of things going on in the background.