Suggestion: Try changing your USER password as "root." That should work....
----- Original Message -----
From: Al Niessner <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: expert-mandrake-linux <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Sent: Sunday, July 18, 1999 6:26 PM
Subject: [expert] changing passwords
>
> I run 'passwd' in my user account to change my password as one would
> expect. Lets pretend my password is currently 'peanut' for now -- no
> this is not my real password and never has been. So, 'passwd' asks for
> my current password to verify that I am who I am and I type it in. It
> then wants a new password. I have decided to make the new one tougher
> so I used 'h4+J,8eFkjS;wEttl4K^2' -- or something like that. 'passwd'
> refuses the new password on grounds that it is too similar to my
> previous one. I find this really hard to believe since it is much
> longer and contains non-alphabet characters unlike my first one. To
> test this problem some more, I tried various length passwords with at
> least one non-alphabet character in it and I get the same response. I
> then used 'walnut' and my password changed without any problems -- no my
> password is not really walnut nor has it ever been. The point is, they
> were both simple words,-- meaning, all lower case, all alphabetic
> characters , and the same length. I would have thought these two
> passwords to be the same even if we ignore they are both nuts. I double
> checked and I am using the expanded password capability -- MD5. Any
> ideas as to what is wrong here? Oh, I also tried it from root using
> 'passwd -u nut' and have the exact same problem -- as I expected but I
> had to try it anyways to be complete.
>
>
> Notes:
>
> I checked the archive and did not find any references for this.
>
> Platform is Mandrake 6.0
>
>
>
