password change

[Elena Leontieva]

Hi,

My user complains that the password security is set too high. He is trying to change to an eight character password including a number and it keeps telling him that it is a bad password - based on a reverse dictionary word. It is not based on any word in English - forward or reverse.

It is RHEL 4 SELinux enabled.

What can I do to help him without doing major changes.

Thanks, -Elena.

[Steven E. Protter]

Shalom Elena,

The crack libraries that support this feature include dictionaries for many languages, including transliterated hebrew.

It is a bad idea to try and bypass this server universally and I don't know how to do it.

What you can do is have the root user set the password for this user. You'll get the warning and can simply ignore it.

Technically you'll know a password you shouldn't but this is better than doing a lot of work.

Why can't the user just pick a different pasword?

:-)
I know,its a user.

SEP

[Sivakumar TS]

Dear Elena,


Did you check for

/etc/default/passwd


With Regards,

Siva.

[Ivan Ferreira · Accepted solution]

Instruct the user to replace common used characters, like vowels by symbols, for example the o by *, the I by 1, etc. Then choose the password, like:

Conditional = C*nd1t1*nal

[Vitaly Karasik_1]

Elena,
I suggest you to read README.pam_cracklib (in my FC3 it's under /usr/share/doc/pam-0.77/txts). This doc describes different ways for tuning pam_cracklib behaviour.
Such parameters you may add to /etc/pam.d/system-auth file.

Rgds,
Vitaly