/etc/shadow hash generation in shell

Posted: 2009-08-17 17:25:51 by Alasdair Keyes

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I've been playing about with system templating recently, configuring a base Linux system then allowing it to be customised for future roll-out without starting the machine up. I found the following little trick to generating password hashes as they appear within the /etc/shadow file. It uses the mkpasswd binary, there are many ways to generate the hash which use openssl and various password apps, but this was the most simple I came across.

I don't believe mkpasswd is in the CentOS yum repo, but is available in Ubuntu's apt repo (apt-get install mkpasswd).

MD5 hashed passwords as found as default on Redhat/CentOS systems

# mkpasswd -m md5 password saltsalt
$1$saltsalt$qjXMvbEw8oaL.CzflDtaK/

SHA512 hashed passwords as found on Ubuntu

# mkpasswd -m sha-512 password saltsaltsaltsalt
$6$saltsaltsaltsalt$bcXJ8qxwY5sQ4v8MTl.0B1jeZ0z0JlA9jjmbUoCJZ.1wYXiLTU.q2ILyrDJLm890lyfuF7sWAeli0yjOyFPkf0

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