This is going to be a short one but it took me a while to find the information here so I figured it would be nice to put it all in one place. When creating accounts in HP-UX it's nice to be able to script them, especially the passwords. But HP-UX doesn't seem to have a handy way to script this like " passwd --stdin " on RHEL.

Luckily HP-UX has a tool called makekey which can make a password has. It does have some unfortunate limitations. It's passwords need to be exactly 8 characters and your choice of salts is limited from 00-99 (and must be two digits). But utilizing this command can allow you to optimize HP-UX to speed up user account creation.

So the basic form is like this:



useradd ... -p `echo 8digitpw## | /usr/lbin/makekey` <username>

passwd -f <username>



Let's explain this. "8digitpw" is your 8 digit initial password. "##" is your two digit numeric salt. Everything in between the `...` will create a has to be placed for a password on the system. And " passwd -f <username> " will set a flag in HP-UX forcing the user to change their password upon next log in (where they'll be able to set a longer password).

Bonus use " usermod ... -p `echo 8digitpw## | /usr/lbin/makekey` <username> " to reset passwords (do " passwd -f <username> " again to make them change it upon next login).

MWguy