HPUX schema

[navin]

Hello,
I have heard that there is an issue at passwd schema for using the characters & * $
Is that true. But lately i too face this kind of problems if i use these characters in passwd especially when using ftp within the applicatopn startup scripts.Is it something with newer version of HPUX?
Please advice.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom,

Older HP-UX releases did have problems with special characters in passwords. I've not noted this behavior from 11i v1 up.

SEP

[OldSchool]

from the man page on HP-UX 11.0


WARNING
Avoid password characters which have special meaning to the tty driver, such as # (erase) and @ (kill). You may not be able to login with these characters.

[DCE]

To add to the previous answer - from the hpux 11.11 man page:

Characters must be from the 7-bit US-ASCII character set; letters from the English alphabet.

The same caveat exists for @, etc as in 11.0

[Mel Burslan]

Very recent discussion about this topic and fine answer from Bill Hassell about "what"s and "what-not"s can be found on this thread:

http://forums1.itrc.hp.com/service/forums/questionanswer.do?threadId=1060545

[Bill Hassell]

AS mentioned, # and @ can be a problem with HP-UX logins except as noted in the previous reference to ttyconf.

However, there is a bigger issue: trying to tie a bunch of unrelated systems together and expect them to work. Special characters can have different meanings on different systems. Some OS's don't care if a password has a space in it, others fail. Some don't care about \ but others will have problems with the character.

Since ftp was mentioned, there is a possibility that the remote system is not HP-UX so you either spend a lot of time researching special character limitations on the remote system...or you simply disallow special characters for all passwords (uppercase, lowercase and numbers -- nothing else).