password aging

[Alan Fargusson]

> In article <527 at dicomed.UUCP> salmi at dicomed.UUCP (John Salmi) writes:
> >I understand that SysV offers a password aging scheme.  Does 4.x BSD support
> >anything similar?  If no, has anyone done a hack to allow password aging?

I seem to have missed the original article, but I would like to say that
we have been using the password aging stuff here for over a year, and I
think it is real poor. Bad things happen when the the date is wrong when
the system comes up, which is real likely since System V uses the time
of day clock in a VAX in a different way then VMS, and the DEC diagnostics
run under VMS. Real life senario: DEC comes in and runs diagnostics, sets
date under VMS, reboots UNIX date becomes next December, passwords age, all
the news expiers, I come in and fix the date, passwords age again (sounds like
a bug, why should they age in reverse?).

Also the new restrictions on what can be used for a password are ridiculous.
They prevent me from using passwords that are hard for other people to type
but are easy for me to type. Everyone that I know just puts a number on
the front of the password that they want anyway, which defeats the restrictions.
-- 

Alan Fargusson.

{ ihnp4, amdahl, mot }!drivax!alan