Changing the administrator password on all hosts

By default all hosts use the shadow password system. As root's password (for obvious reasons) is not available via NIS, we suggest the following method to change the root password on all hosts:

• Login to the front end as root and issue the passwd command to change the password.
• Do an rsh onto the first compute node and do the same.
• Exit back to the front end server and rcp the file /etc/shadow from the first compute node onto a temporary file on the front end.
• Do a copyall to copy the shadow file to all hosts.

e.g

[root@server /root]# passwd
New UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully
[root@server /root]# rsh comp00
[root@comp00  /root]# passwd 
New UNIX password:
Retype new UNIX password:
passwd: all authentication tokens updated successfully
[root@comp00  /root]# exit
[root@server /root]# rcp comp00:/etc/shadow /tmp/shadow
[root@server /root]# copyall /tmp/shadow /etc