Re-assigning an already used password to a user in a trusted system

[Kennedy G. Doss]

SAs:

A few of my users who use a common application account want me to re-assign the same password to an expired account. Is there a kind of backdoor mechanism which I can use to assign the same password (or a password which was already used once, a while ago) to the user.? If yes could you please let me know. This is a trusted system.

Regards,
Kennedy

[RAC_1]

They can set it themselves. Log in as that user and just do passwd

[Kennedy G. Doss]

They can set a different password. But they are unable to set it to a password which was already used a few months back.

[Pete Randall]

This is set either in the /etc/default/security file or in SAM's password policies. Simply unset it, set the password and re-set it.


Pete

[A. Clay Stephenson]

First of all, a shared account is a huge security riskand should be avoided. Moreover, reusing a password negates the value of the password history entries. Having said that this can be done in a couple of ways:

1) Temporarily comment out the PASSWORD_HISTORY_DEPTH entry in /etc/default/security. You can then use the passwd command to re-enter a previously used password. You then re-enable the PASSWORD_HISTORY_DEPTH entry in /etc/default/security.

2) Enter this command:
perl -e '{print crypt("secret","AZ"),"\n"}'

and substitute the desired plaintext password for "secret". You then copy the output of this command into the u_pwd=entry in the /tcb/files/auth/x/xusername file thjat matches this user.

[RAC_1]

If you have password policies set, then you will have to override them for a while.
move /etc/default/security to some other file for a while. Set password and move the security file back.

[Kennedy G. Doss]

Thanks for your feedback. I was able to resolve the issue once I commented out the one of the fields (password depth) in the /etc/default/security file.