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. -- +------------------------------------------------------------+ . | John Saunders mailto:John.Saunders@scitec.com.au (Work) | ,--_|\ | mailto:john@nlc.net.au (Home) | / Oz \ | http://www.nlc.net.au/~john/ | \_,--\_/ | SCITEC LIMITED Phone +61 2 9428 9563 Fax +61 2 9428 9933 | v | "By the time you make ends meet, they move the ends." | +------------------------------------------------------------+ To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-stable" in the body of the message
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