🚀 go-pugleaf

I did something stupid.  I installed shadow passwords as a tarball
instead of as an rpm. (Mike C., you owe me an 'I told you so' :)  I
can't remember why, maybe because I couldn't find the rpm at the time,
maybe I was on my 'rpm's suck, real hackers compile themselves' kick,
maybe just plain stupidity, maybe a combination.

Anyway, my sendmail install wasn't working.  I figured it was a
configuration thing.  I wasn't about to learn how to configure sendmail,
so I found install-sendmail, a nice little perl script.  It needed
sendmail v8.9.x, RH5.2 comes with 8.8.x.  So I got the new rpm's.  They
needed glibc2.1.  So I got those rpm's.  I took a deep breath, but
figure, hey, it's an RPM, if there's a conflict, it won't install.  It
did install.  Yes!

Then I tried to ssh in.  "Connection closed by foregin host".  Telnet:
same thing.  Gulp.  Luckly this was before I had closed my last ssh
window.  I rememberd the shadow passwords.  I forced an downgrade back
to the old glibc rpm, and now everything works again.

Ironically, when I reinstalled sendmail 8.8, it worked fine.  Wish I'd
thought of that before.

So, my question is this:

What will happen when I install the shadow rpm?  Won't it ignore my
current shadow file and encrypt the x in the password field of passwd? 
Anyone ever uninstalled the tarball?  Most of my users don't have
passwords anyway; what if I copied the encrypted password from shadow to
passwd for root and then installed the shadow rpm?  Wouldn't the rpm
just install over the binaries and man pages from the tarball?  Is there
anything I'm missing?

-- 
Adam