Good day folks,

I'm having an issue modifying an existing kickstart for a RHEL5 system. The problem is with encrypting the password.

I'm copying the existing kickstart and using Redhat's online kickstart generator (for RHEL5) to hash the password and am replacing that hash with the one configured in the original. The system loads up fine but when it gets to a login prompt I can't login as root or as the user I've created.

One thing I've noticed that I'm not sure about is the hash for the passwords in the original ks.cfg file is much longer than the one I'm getting from the online generator.

I'm at a loss as to why this isn't working. The original hash works fine. The hash I'm replacing doesn't. I'm not even sure if anything is being logged (or where) so that I can tell where it's going off the rails.

Any advice is greatly appreciated.

I'd think RedHat would be the place to request help for something like that. Is why you pay for that subscription.

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The best advice I can offer is to not mess with anything to do with this. RHEL 5 is *ANCIENT*, and very, VERY unsupported. At this point, it's so far behind in hardware support, security, and bugfixes that it's just not worth it. Get a current RHEL subscription, and spin up a new kickstart image.

Beyond that, if login is your only issue, can you boot to single-user mode, manually mount the / partition, and edit the shadow file to remove the root password, then login?

1 members found this post helpful.