After a series of break-in attempts, I generated new random passwords for all the users on my Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS server running Virtualmin and then, as root, used chpasswd to change their passwords. I had a couple of user names wrong, and chpasswd detected this and correctly reported the lines with the wrong names, which I corrected.
Then I started to get feedback from the users that their passwords weren't changed...
Well, it seems that chpasswd doesn't seem to have done anything at all - but neither has it reported any sort of error, either on the command line or in any log that I found.
passwd does change passwords - but unfortunately passwd on Ubuntu doesn't seem to accept the --stdin option, so I'd have to do all the password changes by hand one at a time - for almost a hundred accounts. (And I might want to do this again at some point...)
Is chpasswd simply broken, or is there some way I can make it work? Or, is there some substitute for it?
And - should I be reporting a feature deficiency somewhere? I don't believe that "failing silently" is a good result. Perhaps there's something on my system (which uses Virtualmin for domain management but is otherwise quite vanilla) that prevents it from working - but if so, chpasswd should be able to detect this and at least say that it failed to act.
But passwd works perfectly well, so it's clearly possible to change passwords from the command line... One way or the other, it seems like an objective feature deficiency ("bug") to me - should I report it, and if so, where?
Update: stranger yet - some users are reporting their passwords are changed, and some are reporting they aren't. One user who has two accounts has one password changed, one not. I ran through the file again, checking that all the accounts were there, and then ran it through chpasswd again... same results!
I'm baffled. Ideas?
UPDATE: Here's the command line I'm now using:
cat passwords.txt | chpasswd
If I use -S - I see no output - nothing at all! So it seems to be getting nothing... but if I just cat the file:
cat passwords.txt
I get: user:password user2:hunter2 [... etc ...]
More: If I change the first line to be NONuser (an invalid user), I get a perfectly good error:
chpasswd: (user NONuser) pam_chauthtok() failed, error:
Authentication token manipulation error
chpasswd: (line 1, user NONuser) password not changed
So it is in fact reading and processing the file, at least as far as detecting non-users!
Oh, and $? is 0.
