Security file on SUSE Linux

[Juan Gonzalez_2]

I am running SUSE Linux 8 on a HP ProLiant DL5800 G3 server. I am tring to find out in what file the length of a users password has to be and other parameters like the one you set so Administrators can only login to the server as root at the console. Like in HP-UX it is found in /etc/default/security.

[Stuart Browne]

The closest would be the settings in '/etc/pam.d/passwd' and '/etc/pam.d/login'.

'pam' (or Pluggable Authentication Module) contols most things like this. I've not got a SuSE system handy, but I'm reasonably sure that '/etc/pam.d/passwd' will have a line referencing 'pam_cracklib.so'. It takes a 'minlen=X' argument to specify the minimum length of a password.

As for the other, that is controlled by 'pam_securetty.so'. This, tied with '/etc/securetty' (plain-text file) should be able to limit which TTY's a super-user can log in from.

The 'man pam' page, coupled with the documentation that comes with PAM should provide more details.

[Ivan Ferreira]

Normally, all pam configuration files references to /etc/pam.d/system-auth. If you change system-auth then all other services will use this configuration. Modify the configuration file as described above. I'm not sure about SUSE but other distributions also use the /etc/login.defs file:

PASS_MIN_LEN