Minimum Password Lenght on HP-UX 10.20

[Obie Oberholster]

Can anybody tell me where I can change the setting for the minimum password lenght. By default it is set to 6. SAM allows you to only set the maximum, but I think the minimum is as important, if not more to set.

Secondly I need to restrict the re-use of old UID's. I cannot find anywhere in SAM to do this.

Any comments will be welcome.

Regards
Obie

[Vladislav Demidov]

The feature of setting minimun password length is available only when you are using authentication database.

[Brian M. Fisher]

If your system hase been converted to trusted, the Maximum Password Length setting defines how many characters are allowed in system-generated passwords, this limit does NOT apply to user-specified passwords. As far as setting a minimum length, I do not know of a way within the shipped HP-UX. A better precation is to regularly run a password cracking program, such as Crack or John the Ripper, against your passwords to look for weak ones.
As far as restricting the use of old UID's, the way I work around this problem is to never remove a login from the system, the accounts are just disabled.

Brian
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[Duane Gorder]

Regarding duplicate UIDs, we were fortunate to have a five digit corporate ID number, so we use those for UIDs, and let the Human Resources department worry about not allowing duplicates.

[Rick Garland]

Re-using UIDs is not recommended. Disable the acct that is no longer in use and the UID will not be used again. This for disabled accts. If you remove the acct from the system, the UID is available.

Use a script that will indicate to you what is the 1st available UID that you can use. You can also put some logic into it that will specify a range of UIDs that are available by the user's default group membership.

[RDCanada]

Disabling the accounts will work fine until account # 1301, with 1300 maximum accounts in the password file.