From: Chris Mueller <cmueller@...>
Date: 2005-02-25T04:28:17+09:00
Subject: MD5 Password creation

Hi, I'm looking at creating md5 passwords in ruby then manually 
replacing the users pass in the /etc/shadow file. I unfortunately cannot 
use the ruby-password or ruby-termios libraries as they are not in the 
Debian-stable tree (long story).

I looked in the source for ruby-password and noticed that if the salt 
supplied for crypt is $1$, the returned string is an md5 digest. 
Unfortunately this does not work

crypt_pass = password.crypt("$1$as")

the resulting does not have enough chars

I also tried

crypt_pass = Digest::MD5.hexdigest(password)

This produces something a little closer to what I need, but if I 
manually replace someone's password with this string, it also does not 
work. Also, it appears to be 2 digits shorter than what /bin/passwd creates.

I've searched high and low for a few days now, and haven't been able to 
come up with anything online.

Does anybody have any ideas?

-Chris