The attacker need only sort them, and then check for matches. This method is usable by your average teenager with a couple of hundred spare Megabytes and a 486 class computer. Then the program can be run sgid shadow . Why you might NOT want to install the Shadow Suite. If you don't see any, try changing your password and look again.
Many distributions come with accounts with no password.
If you are running RedHat, you should use the RPM that is approporiate for your RedHat version to install shadow support. RedHat's shadow support is not the same as that documented here, so refer to RedHat's documentation If the machine does not contain any user accounts, then you probably don't need shadow support, unless you are installing it just to gain the experience. If your machine runs other software that validates users, and there is no shadow version available, and you don't have the source code you shouldn't install the Shadow Suite. Both Livingston and Ascend have shadow support in their Radius servers. The Shadow commands and manual pages refer to this field as the comment field.