Re: bug or feature?
On Aug 1, E.L. Meijer (Eric) wrote
> Furthermore I always wondered why there is a limitation of 8 characters.
> Wouldn't it be a lot harder to crack passwords if only they were allowed
> to be a little longer?
Yes, but there are a lot of programs in use that assume 8 characters max.
For example, you're on a Debian system in a network where the password file
is shared through NIS. If you change your password on the Debian system
to something with more than 8 chars, you might find yourself unable to
login/telnet/rlogin/ftp to another system.
That said, there are many cases where more than 8 chars would be desirable.
IIRC, using PAM (http://parc.power.net/morgan/Linux-PAM/) would free us from
this limit. AFAIK we have the basis for PAM, but no applications are
PAM-aware yet.
Ray
--
Tevens ben ik van mening dat Nederland overdekt dient te worden.
--
TO UNSUBSCRIBE FROM THIS MAILING LIST: e-mail the word "unsubscribe" to
debian-user-request@lists.debian.org .
Trouble? e-mail to templin@bucknell.edu .
Reply to: