[plug] Redhat passwords - max 8 chars!?

[Carl Gherardi]

Something i noticed a while ago.

All my passwords are at least 9 chars long, and i made a typo on the 10th
char one day, and redhat(6.1) let me in.

So after a bit of testing i found that at least the redhat distro ingnores
everything but the first 8 chars of a password.

Is this the same across all distros? I tested this on freeBSD and it
rejects me..

and why would this be?

Thanks

Carl