Password setting does not reset expired date.

[Joe Latino]

I have enabled password expiring (on a non trusted system). I have noticed the clock starts ticking from the previous Thursday. (Not sure why but I live with it). My main concern is that if a user changes his/her password before the 7 days are up(we have set it to 7 days to expire because we are testing this functionality out to see how it works) they have to change it again once the 7 days has expired, its as if it doesn't reset the passwd expiration date when they initially changed their password. Is this the way its suppose to work? Again we are running UX 11 (non trusted).

Thanks
Joe

[A. Clay Stephenson · Accepted solution]

This is normal. The "problem" is that the counters in a non-trusted system have a resolution of 1 week. They actually know nothing about days. This means for example, that 8 days and 12 days for example are indistinguishable.

Man 4 passwd; this is explained rather well there.

[Kent Ostby]

What does the entry look like from the password file ?

What patches if any do you have for password (swlist -l product | grep password ) ?

[A. Clay Stephenson]

I'll even add a hint about what's special about Thursday's : 01-Jan-1970 was a Thursday.

[Joe Latino]

We have no patches from swlist.

Here is an example of two users:

passwd -s normand
normand PS 03/25/04 0 7
passwd -s jlatino2
jlatino2 PS 03/18/04 0 7


Normand was set today, jlatino2 was set Monday. Not sure why jlatino2 is not being prompted today to change my password.

So given what I have read in the replies users should not change their passwords until they have expired?
Very interesting about why Thursday.

Thanks

[A. Clay Stephenson]

You don't have to wait until the password expires to change it. Just note that the counter treats every day from a Thursday through the following Wednesday as the same day -- again, the resolution is one week. This was a compromise in trying to stuff reasonable amounts of time into a small data footprint. I would set -x max to about 91 days or so and set -n min to 7. Note that when min is set to 7 that might only mean 1 day -- if you set the passwd on a Wednesday or the full 7 days if on a Thursday. You should also note that all the timekeeping is UTC so when it's Thursday in Greenwich is all that really counts.