As I suspected the installer in FC2 still has the following anoying problem. You create the root user before you decide that you don't want to use md5 passwds. So root has a md5 passwd that screws up passwd autherization ant least if you are using NIS. Why was this done? It would have been easy to make the default non-md5 passwds. -- ------------------------------------------- Aaron Konstam Computer Science Trinity University One Trinity Place. San Antonio, TX 78212-7200 telephone: (210)-999-7484 email:akonstam@xxxxxxxxxxx