Read this file first for a brief overview of the current version
of passwd.


---Shadow passwords

The command `shadowconfig on' will turn on shadow password support.
This is the default. Turning off shadow passwords is not supported
anymore.
Together with shadow passwords, you get the ability to set password ages
and expirations with chage(1).

NOTE: If you use the nscd package, you may have problems with a
slight delay in updating the password information. You may notice
this during upgrades of certain packages that try to add a system
user and then access the users information immediately afterwards.
To avoid this, it is suggested that you stop the nscd daemon before
upgrades, then restart it again.

---General configuration

Most of the configuration for the shadow utilities is in
/etc/login.defs.  See login.defs(5).  The defaults are quite
reasonable.

Also see the /etc/pam.d/* files for each program to configure the PAM
support. PAM documentation is available in several formats in the
libpam-doc package.


---Encryption

This is enabled now using the /etc/pam.d/* files. Examples are given.


---Adding users and groups

Though you may add users and groups with the SysV type commands,
useradd and groupadd, I recommend you add them with Debian adduser
version 3+.  adduser gives you more configuration and conforms to the
Debian UID and GID allocation.

Editing user and group parameters can be done with usermod and
groupmod.  Removing users and groups can be done with userdel and
groupdel.


--- Group administration

Local group allocation is much easier.  With gpasswd(1) you can
designate users to administer groups.  They can then securely add or
remove users from the group.


--- What to read next?

Read the manpages, the other files in this directory, and the Shadow
Password HOWTO (included in the doc-linux package).  A large portion
of these files deals with getting shadow installed.  You can, of
course, ignore those parts.

Also, the libpam-doc package will go a long way to allowing you to take
full advantage of the PAM authentication scheme.
