Q about new user account passwords

[jenbass]

Hey-up, all - When I use the adduser command to create a new account, right - if I then su to that new account and do the passwd thing to set a passwd, it asks what the current password is. Leaving this blank, typing root's password - nothing seems to make it happy, and so the only way to get into the new account is through root, which isn't very useful. What am I doing wrong here? How can a brand new account have a password?
Thanks,
Jenny.
PS: is there any way that root can have a look at all the passwords? (RH6.2)
PPS: Sorry if this has come up before.

[mis]

In 6.1 what I had to do was

adduser dog
passwd dog
then it asked for the passwd I wanted to set it at.

If you are trying to make it so that the user can create their own password then I am not sure. HTH

Mis

[jenbass]

Hey that works! Great, many thanks.

[Craig McPherson]

A user in Linux can have a "no valid password" state, which is just what it says it is: there's no password that'll work for that account. In olden times, new accounts would be created with a blank password, but that was bad for security -- your system is probably defaulting to putting new accounts in a no-valid-password state until you assign a password to them with the passwd command.

[JAdrock]

jenbass assuming your passwords are shadowed, I don't think you'll be able to decrypt them...but then again i'm not intelligent in that area, however if your passwords are for some odd reason plain-text they'll be in /etc/passwd if i'm not mistaken, and then root would be able to see them all.

[jenbass]

hmmmm, no, etc/passwd shows encrypted passwords (exclamation marks in some cases, asterisks in others) and the shadow passwd file (which I haven't got as such, but have got a "passwd- " file, I presumed that was it) has no information on passwords either- I tried to read up a bit, but couldn't find an answer as to whether or not these files are ever human readable.