Date: Fri, 20 Mar 1998 13:36:06 +1100 From: John Saunders <john.saunders@scitec.com.au> To: questions@FreeBSD.ORG Cc: freebsd-stable@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Password Characters Not Required??? Message-ID: <3511D616.F99D6219@scitec.com.au> References: <Pine.BSF.3.96.980319172128.23320A-100000@fledge.watson.org> <Pine.BSF.3.96.980319151824.21872A-100000@shell.uniserve.com> <19980320131717.53739@welearn.com.au>
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Sue Blake wrote:
> I don't understand this stuff, but I did a braindead-newbie installation of
> 2.2.2 and I use long passwords because I never heard there was a limit of 8.
> The long passwords are very real on my system.
>
> My 43 character password doesn't work if I leave characters off the end.
> My 89 character password doesn't work if I omit or change the last
> character.
Hmm, I suspect you didn't install the DES security stuff (the bit that
warns you about not installing if you are not a US resident). DES is a
compatible algorithm that only takes 8 significant characters from the
password. If you use DES you can copy /etc/passwd entries from one Unix
OS to another and expect them to work. The default is to use MD5 which
only allows the encrypted passwords to work with FreeBSD (or maybe a
small number of others). I strongly suspect (but don't know for sure)
that the MD5 code uses all the letters you supply or a very large
number of them.
Cheers.
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