15 Character Passwords on Unix/Solaris.

Hello jbowlin,

If you're staying within the unix realm, a 15 character password shouldn't be an issue.  (Though that sounds like overkill to me.....)

Some applications, particularly some IBM products, require shorter passwords.


Good Luck,
Kent

By default Solaris (and most other Unix flavours) will only recognise the first 8 characters of a password.

So if you set your password to

abcdefgh123

You could type in

acbdefgh38udsfkhsfksfu

or

abcdefgh

and your password would be accepted.

You can increase the maximum length of passwords on Solaris =>9 systems to 255 characters, by editing /etc/security/policy.conf and set

CRYPT_ALGORITHMS_ALLOW=1,2a,md5
CRYPT_ALGORITHMS_DEPRECATE=__unix__
CRYPT_DEFAULT=1

For Solaris you can edit /etc/default/passwd file to have longer password length
PASSLENGTH=x

But keep in mind, many application has a limit to 8 char for
password, eg the old Solstice adm suit for NIS+ etc.

This is for Solaris 8.
It is a mandated by a Government Agency no choice in the matter.

With Solaris 8, you are stuck with a maximum recognised password length of 8.

You can set:
PASSLENGTH=15
to require passwords to be a minimum of 15 charts (if you are using /etc/passwd /etc/shadow files) but soem other app
might not like it.  (It can become an app issure, not the OS issue).

BTW this was fixed in Solaris 10

Chris.

Wasn't really "fixed" in Solaris 10.  Solaris =>9 has the option to set MD5 passwords (as used on BSD/Linux) in /etc/security/policy.conf, which has a maximum password length of 255.

Setting PASSLENGTH without changing this setting, still won't make any difference.