Anand Kumria wrote:
>
> On Wed, Apr 05, 2000 at 10:20:16PM +1000, Kieran wrote:
> > This leads to another question I have. What's the limit of a password in
> > linux? I know under NIS it seems to be 8 characters (unless that's
> > configurable).. Anyone?
>
> It has been sometime since I last looked at the crypt(3) but from memory it
> only cares about the first 8 characters. If you want longer passwords
> one way to do so would be to use MD5 hashing.
>
> This is fairly simple if you are using Pluggable Authentication Modules (PAM)
> but unfortunately isn't compatible when using NIS services.
Another way to do it is with LDAP authentication based on an OpenLDAP
server, and nss_ldap and pam_ldap (note that in RedHat 6.2 this has
just changed to a single nss_ldap RPM). A bit more tricky to get going
than NIS but much more scalable. This supports plain text, crypt, MD5,
and SHA1 passwords of any length.
A slightly more secure way is to use NDS (from Novell) which has a
pam_nds and nss_nds module as well. It's bigger and more memory hungry
than OpenLDAP but has end to end encryption of the LDAP traffic using
SSL. NDS is neither open source nor free, but at $2 per user, setting
up NDS for you and your 3 flatmates is going to cost you a massive
$8.00 . Well worth looking into, IMHO. You also get a Windoze client,
something that NIS only just has and OpenLDAP doesn't have, for those
multi platform environments.
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