[plug] No passwd for user

[Harry McNally]

On Fri, 2 Aug 2002 09:50:39 +0800 (WST) "Anthony J. Breeds-Taurima"
<tony at cantech.net.au> wrote:

> On Thu, 1 Aug 2002, I am the LinuxAlien wrote:
> 
> > In Debian Woody I set the password policies to min letters=0, when it asks 
> > for a passwd if i don't enter one it complains, if i enter something like 
> > today it also complains that it is to simple. I need a simple user without 
> > a password. Is this possible?
> 
> By doing this you're asking everyone to have numberic passwords.
> 
> You can (as root) passwd -d fred, to set fred's password to nothing
> or if you're (ver bad idea) making a policy decision that in gneral any user
> can set his/her password to '' then you need to change:
> 
> password   required   pam_unix.so nullok obscure min=4 max=8 md5
> to                                                   *
> password   required   pam_unix.so nullok obscure min=0 max=8 md5

Hi Tony

Noting that you've said "this is very bad idea" but taking it further so I
understood what I was reading, I did:

/etc# grep -r password *

and discovered the files in /etc/pam.d (yeah righto .. still learning :)

Then:

/etc/pam.d# man pam.d

to learn more.

Since I've got this directory 'man pam.d' tells me this overrides the simple
/etc/pam.conf file.

My question is: were you advising Mr Alien to change just the entry in
/etc/pam.d/passwd ?

Alternatively, for his idea to work, must he also change the auth entries for
services to which the user is allowed access ?

I acknowledge that this allows the user to negate security somewhat (alot!) but
I'm interested from the general PAM adjustment perspective.

cu
Harry

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