Password hashes?

[Guardian1234]

One of my fellow admins said that it is entirely possible to place ESXi 5 password hashes into the password file rather than the shadow file.

Anyone ever hear of this!?!?!?!?!

Thx.

[Josh26 · Accepted solution]

Although I continue to argue "ESXi is not Linux", this is something that doesn't make much sense in the Linux world and I doubt it makes much sense here.

Where else would you put it?

shadow is already a well audited and protected system. Password is world readable.

[Guardian1234]

I agree completely. When I questioned my coworker this AM (she was on  the way out yesterday when it was mentioned), it became apparent that  there was little UNIX savvy there, let alone ESXi savvy.

I explained that the shadow file was one of the basic 3  that are part and parcel to the PAM system natively used by ESXi and  its existence is supported by pam_unix.so. All I got back was a  "deer-in-the-headlights" look, which confirmed the non-savvy theory.

While alot of "cherry-pickers" looked at this post w/o  replying, I appreciate your taking time to give a response, so...  Josh26, the correct answer goes to you!

Thx again.

[Tsjo]

I haven't checked if it is, but as long pwconv and/or pwunconv exists on the system you can convert between shadow and passwd as much as you like.

It's not recommended but it's possible.

[Guardian1234]

Neither of those cmds appear to exist on ESXi 5.0.

They may have on earlier version of X, where there was a COS.

Thx.