I have a question about John the Ripper and it's incremental mode. As far as I know, the incremental mode is a brute-force mode, and it tries to get the password by systematic combining all possibilities for a password.
Depending on the password type it takes longer, that's clear. But let it be a md5 salted password hash. Is John automatically using the salt which is written in cleartext on /etc/shadow
file to crack the password? or is it also guessing a valid salt?