It is not related with the splunk.secret as suggested in other replies. When creating the same users with same passwords in two different instances, it first generates a random salt. Then the salt is concatenated with the password and hashed. It is done this way to ensure the security (to prevent rainow tables). As the salt is randomly generated, both instances will have a random salt (between $6$ and $) and therefore a different hash (after the last mentioned $). When copying the passwd line to another instance, we are enforcing this new server to use the same salt and therefore the hash will be the same. In summary, you can both create a user in both servers or just create it in one of them and copy the passwd file to the other one. If this is helpful please give me karma 😄 ... View more