encountered two fedora 6 issues - underscore in host name, :*: in passwd file prevented logins

[Todd Littlefield]

If I remember correctly, underscores are not allowed in names.  Only 
a-z, 0-9 and the
hyphen character are acceptable.  I can't quote the RFC, but someone here
probably can ;-)

Python wrote:
> (For Your Information - it may save you some grief)
>
> amanda would not backup my laptop.  There were no useful error messages
> in the amanda log.  I finally ran tcpdump to monitor the chit-chat and
> discovered that reverse lookup for my LAN (192.168.0.x) numbers was not
> working.  
>
> host 192.168.0.5
> Host 5.0.168.192.in-addr.arpa not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
> mem.c:877: INSIST(ctx->stats[i].gets == 0U) failed.
> Aborted
>
> named-checkzone approved the zone file; named-checkconf approved the
> overall configuration.
>
> named-checkconf -t /var/named/chroot -z
> 	(use chroot style of operation)
> 	(load the zone files)
> gave an error for a host name s_kvam in the reverse lookup file.  Once I
> changed the hostname to be skvam, the reverse lookup worked.
>
>
>
> The other issue was an inability to login as root!  This spooked me, but
> there was no evidence of foul play.  My normal account and sudo worked.
> The fix consisted of changing the root line:
>
> < root:*:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash
> ---
>   
>> root:x:0:0:root:/root:/bin/bash
>>     
>
>
> The problems were on a system that I upgraded from FC3 to FC6.  
>
>