password.ks.md

Adding a password to kickstart

Setting a password for your users if very helpful during kickstart installation.

Editing kickstart file

Most times this task is as simple as:

# root password plaintext
rootpw "password here"

# root password hashed
rootpw --iscrypted HASH

# Adding a user with password hashed
user --groups=wheel --name=admin --password=HASH --iscrypted --gecos="wtd-admin"

As you can see you have to generate some hashes. These hashes depend on the used password algorithm, defined via:

auth --enableshadow --passalgo=sha512

Generating the hash

To generate such a hash, you can find some examples below in python. You will be prompted for the password. The salt should differ each time. It can be any random string.

MD5

echo 'import crypt,getpass; print crypt.crypt(getpass.getpass(), "$1$8_CHARACTER_SALT")' | python -

SHA256

echo 'import crypt,getpass; print crypt.crypt(getpass.getpass(), "$5$16_CHARACTER_SALT")' | python -

SHA512

echo 'import crypt,getpass; print crypt.crypt(getpass.getpass(), "$6$16_CHARACTER_SALT_HERE")' | python -