system password's file

[Sergey Babkin]

>On Fri, 14 Oct 2005 iwan at staff.usd.ac.id wrote:
>
>> I want to migrate from linux to freebsd. My linux box (mail server) have 
>> alot of user (hundreds) --this is the problem. I dont know which file 
>> which the password's file. I dont want typing user name and its password 
>> one by one. Beside of that, thereis possibly my users change their 
>> passwords. How can I do this migrating ? (save) I'm sorry my English is 
>> not good.
>
>The main man page you want to look at is passwd(5), which documents the 
>formats of the /etc/master.passwd and /etc/passwd file.  In FreeBSD, the 
>master.passwd file is the equivilent of the shadow file in Linux.  What 
>you want to do is convert the Linux password files to the master.passwd 
>file in FreeBSD, and then run

Historically the problem has been that FreeBSD used
its own MD5 algorithm for encrypting the passwords
which was incompatible with any other Unix, so
just copying the password field to FreeBSD did
not work. I don't know if it's fixed now or not.
The reason for that was in the US cryptography
export regulations, and those have been improved
in the last few years. In any case, even if it's
not directly supported then probably a PAM module
can still be written.

Hm, considering the we'd like people to migrate
from Linux to FreeBSD, having such a conversion
script/program (especially if someone writes it
for their own use anyway) in the base system
would make a lot of sense.

-SB