passwd : how to setup it ?

[bcostacurta]

Hello,

when trying to setup a password with the standard system command 'passwd' I receive following message :

BAD PASSWORD : it is based on a dictionary word

How to avoid this ?
More generally, how to setup passwd related to this ?

Note: the account to be change is a very low rights one and a very simple password is indeed desired.

Thanks.
Bye,
Bruno

[Lakshmipathi]

try to combine numbers and other special characters in your password.that should work,

[bcostacurta]

Sorry but your answer is not relevant to my question, maybe I was confusing in my first email.

I'm looking how/ where is 'passwd' configured or on which dependency it relies.

I use few and different Linux distros and the behaviour of passwd is different, meaning that very basic work, ie. 'password' will be accepted in some case but refused in others.

So it seems that the command 'passwd' is configurable is some way, or dependent to other services or files : this is what I'm looking for.

Bye,
Bruno

[Lakshmipathi]

as far as i know, /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow are password files and shadow file will have encrypted (md5 ? algorithm ) password.
if your question is about how the password dictionary works - then i got no idea on that.
i found following links which might be useful for you.

[Blue forest-free software] - how to abolish BAD PASSWORD : it is too simplistic/systematic installed? - Linux
Linux Shadow Password HOWTO: Why shadow your passwd file?
Password Security
Cracking Unix and Linux password files for beginners | Governmentsecurity.org

[jayd512]

I have found, on some distros, that simple passwords (such as 'password') are rejected by the system. But will sometimes be accepted if you login as root.
Example:

su -
<enter root password>
passwd <username>

You may still get a warning, but perhaps you'll get what you need out of it.

[bcostacurta]

Apparently the PAM (Pluggable Authentication Module) configuration is the way used to define parameters and behaviors of command 'passwd', ie. password length required, dictionary used to check it ...etc..

Bye,
Bruno

[lomcevak]

One way to do this is to use the usermod command to change the password. Problem is the password has to be encrypted. I use perl's crypt function to do this.

#!/bin/bash -vx

psswd="abcdef"
seed="123"
epsswd="`perl -e "print crypt($psswd,$seed);"`"
usermod -p $epsswd username