RE: User?s and Shells

> I don't know why RH does this. But having a valid shell in /etc/passwd
<snip>
> The "*" or some other symbol like "!" means, that this is not a valid

In July 2001, there was an ssh issue that affected user accounts with !! in their password field. This issue wouldn't have been quite as big a risk for redhat systems, if they had set the shells for these accounts to be /bin/false or something similar.

So, this isn't an issue in and of itself, but by changing the shells, we could help mitigate the effect of other potential security issues. Received on Fri Dec 20 20:27:12 2002