From: utzoo!decvax!cca!sdyer@Bbn-Unix@sri-unix Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards Title: Re: efficiency of /etc/passwd lookup Article-I.D.: sri-unix.4045 Posted: Tue Oct 26 03:53:45 1982 Received: Wed Oct 27 07:31:58 1982 From: Steve Dyer Date: 23 Oct 1982 15:39:23 EDT (Saturday) At Harvard we replaced /etc/passwd with a hashed-on-logname, fixed record organization, with "private" information (such as encrypted passwords, student ID nos., etc.) kept in a parallel, publically- unreadable file. And, yes, it's very easy to encapsulate these changes by rewriting the handful of get**ent routines. Standard Bell or Berkeley programs run without reprogramming. For those few programs which might migrate to our system in binary form, we regenerated an /etc/passwd file (with a phoney password field) every morning. It wasn't a realistic possibility for us to use the /etc/passwd organization, because we had over 2500 unique lognames on each of our 11/70's. Steve Dyer P.S.: The decision to prevent access to passwords was deliberate, stemming from the fact that the earlier V6 password algorithm had been broken easily by a number of undergraduates. The latest DES is tougher, of course, but we didn't want to be the testbed.