Migrate user from old Fedora (2) to new (14) instance - 32bit to 64bit, /etc/shadow difference

Question

I've followed the guide going around about migrating linux user accounts over to a new system. All seemed to go ok, I didn't toast the /etc/passwd or /etc/shadow files and home directories look right. But one thing I did notice is that the migrated /etc/shadow entries are a much smaller strings, and one user that tried so far is not able to login. I have not confirmed this myself though. I am going from Fedora Core 2 (yes) to 14. Since there is a 32bit vs. 64bit difference also I wonder if that affects the generation of the has in the /etc/shadow and if the old entires can be reused.

Is there a way to migrate/convert the old passwords to the new system? As I would prefer not to make everyone reset their password if not truly necessary. Or should the old entries work fine and something else is wrong?

Answer 1

Authdb entries are uniform across architectures, although certain algorithms may only be supported on certain distros. Different algorithms will produce entries of different lengths, but that would not be an issue per se.