Thursday, 11 January 2007

Enforcing the use of more secure passwords under FreeBSD

Usually I am a very nice guy when it comes to handing out shell accounts, but when it comes to users using dictionary words as passwords I draw a line. In order to at least force them to do some thinking before choosing "password" as a password I do the following.

Add these two lines to your /etc/login.conf

:mixpasswordcase:\
:minpasswordlen=8:\

This will enforce a minimum length of eight characters and force them to mix case. And don't forget to rebuild the database, in case you didn't notice the comment in login.conf.

# cap_mkdb /etc/login.conf

Now, you have a standard for passwords. Even though it's fairly weak, it's better than nothing.

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