Let me state what I think you are trying to do. You want to sync the password for a user on an as400 with the same user on AIX?
There are several problems with using ftp to do this.
Ftp can not execute scripts. Thus it might be able to move the password from one machine to the other but has no way of telling AIX to change the password of the user.
Passwords are stored in encrypted form. That is, the clear text form of the password is never stored on the machine. The algorithm that converts a clear text password to its encrypted form is one way. Meaning you can not take the encrypted password apply and algorithm and get the clear text password back. So unless you are going to store the passwords in clear text on the as400 ( and just the idea of doing so should make every sys admin's heart stop ) you would have to find and move the encrypted password from one machine to the other.
Now, when a user logs in, the system asks for the password. The password given is encrypted and the result is compared with the stored encrypted password. If you moved the encrypted password from the as400 to the AIX machine, it will only work if the encryption algorithms used on both machines are exactly the same. If they are not, then the clear text password will be encrypted differently on both machines and will never match.
AIX does not have a single file with encrypted user passwords. The password file has other things in it. I don't know as400, but I bet its the same. So your script would have to pull the correct password out of the as400 file and store it somewhere. Then you would have to ftp the file to the AIX box. Then a script on the AIX machine would have to pull the encrypted password and place it in the right spot of /etc/security/passwd. If the script has an error in it, it could corrupt the passwd file which would keep everyone from logging onto the machine.
I am doing password synchronization between 32 AIX machines and I know of others who do it between AIX and Solaris, but I would not recommend doing this between as400 and AIX unless your really sure of what your doing.
Before you criticize someone, you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way you're a mile away and you have their shoes.
