[K12OSN] Need to lower password complexity

Petre Scheie petre at maltzen.net
Thu Sep 14 16:08:15 UTC 2006


Loosen them up how?  Make them shorter?  Actually, they don't need to be very complex. 
I've had good luck telling people to just put three words together, perhaps throw in a 
number, like so:

dogcatgoat
happy2day
king4aday

If they are too young to handle passwords like this--which seems doubtful if they're 
using the passwd command--then consider using a kiosk setup and do away with logins all 
together.

Minimum password length is set in /etc/login.defs in the PASS_MIN_LEN key.  The default 
is five characters.  But if you change this to a lesser number, I would argue you're 
asking for trouble, as short passwords can be easy to crack.

Petre


Jim Anderson wrote:
> I would like to be able to lower password complexity when a user is
> using passwd to change their password.  The password change restrictions
> are too high for the population I'm working with.  Apparently when using
> passwd a new password has to be very complex.  I need to loosen up the
> complexity requirements but I don't know how.




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