I have been doing some tests on my comp, Redhat 7.2, to find out how the passwords are encrypted. My /etc/passwd is shadowed and in /etc/shadow, I have found that the salt with my account and for root's account is a three bytes! Is this correct, or have I misunderstood something?

I have created other test accounts, just to observe the salt and yes, the same for the new ones as well. When I try to encrypt the same password as my account with the salt present in mine and root's encrypted password, they don't match!

Could someone please shed some light on the situation? I would be very thankful.

Thanks :-)