On Sun, 28 Mar 1999, Conrad Rehill wrote:

> I'm using a  Quadra 650 and not having much trouble using the system, BUT...
> when the machine boots up, I can't seem to get it out of a single-user mode.
> The only login ID it will accept is root, and even if I manually set up a new
> account in etc/passwd and create the necessary home directory and
> ownership/perms. , the machine refuses to accept the login ID and password
> supplied.  Furthermore, there is no password requested when I login as root.

It sounds like you actually are in multi-user mode--single-user
wouldn't prompt you for a login. You change root's password with
`passwd -l root'. That will put the encrypted passwd in
/etc/master.passwd. /etc/passwd, OTH, has no passwords at all. It's
world-readable so that "ls -l" can give the file owner uids as names
(among other things), but you would never want everyone to have access
to the encrypted passwords. When you use "vipw" to add an account,
you'll be editing master.passwd. (But do use vipw, don't edit
/etc/master.passwd directly.)