Hello, I have a very weird problem on a CentOS 5.2 system. A few months ago, encrypted passwords in the shadow file were MD5'ed - allowing for long passwords, rather than only 8 characters max. Today, passwords are 3DES'ed only. No way to find how the system reverted to DES-encrypting. But what's more bothersome is we cannot get the system to go the MD5 way again, despite all our best efforts. Authconfig says this :
pam_unix is always enabled shadow passwords are enabled password hashing algorithm is md5
So... where to look ?
Have you checked /etc/libuser.conf for crypt_style? pwck and grpck can verify integrity of the data in /etc/passwd /etc/group /etc/shadow /etc/gshadow.