The following reply was made to PR bin/35189; it has been noted by GNATS.

From: Havard Eidnes <he@NetBSD.org>
To: albert.terb@hotmail.com
Cc: gnats-bugs@NetBSD.org
Subject: Re: port-i386/35189: NetBSD-3.1 do not remember password user
 accounts
Date: Tue, 05 Dec 2006 13:52:48 +0100 (CET)

 > >Synopsis:       NetBSD-3.1 do not remember password user accounts
 
 This works for most others (myself included), so this is merely a
 guess about what might be wrong on your particular system:
 
  * perhaps you upgraded from an earlier release and extracted the
    binary sets by hand, and forgot to use the "p" option to tar?  The
    "p" option is required to preserve correct ownership and protection
    bits, including set-user-ID bits, which may be required to get at
    the authentication info in /etc/master.passwd or its associated
    database.
 
 I thught that 3.1 is post-PAM, so the PAM configuration files need to
 be in /etc/pam.d/, but I think the failure mode would be that noone
 would be able to log in if that wasn't in place.
 
 Regards,
 
 - H=E5vard