How can I set rules for the passwords of user accounts? and how can I actually enforce these rules. That is: when I create a shell account I give it a password and then i want to force the user to change this password after his first login, and change it to a password that has to satisfy some rules, like for example: having special characters, digits ...etc
outrun
4:45 pm on Jun 19, 2004 (gmt 0)
For the force password type man chage in the shell I would set the days for password to expire and set the date password last changed to more then how many days the password will expire so that this means when they log on they are forced to change there password.
Install PAM (Pluggable Authentication Modules) for better check on passwords documentation is found here
RedHat uses pam_cracklib (/etc/pam.d/system_auth) to check passwords before they are changed. Look at the docs: README.pam_cracklib and /usr/share/doc/cracklib-2.7for the options you can set to require stronger passwords and such.