Howto change system password policies (passwd length, complexity)
 

This is probably a very stupid question, but as an administrator, where would I go to change linux password policy settings (length, complexity, etc)?

I know many distros have GUI tools that do this, but I'd rather learn it from the console so I'm not dependant on the GUI (because not all distros have the same GUIs).

"as an administrator, where would I go to change linux password policy settings (length, complexity, etc)?
I know many distros have GUI tools that do this, but I'd rather learn it from the console"

Essentially you have a choice of md5 rules or not md5 rules. SuSE has a readme that explains how to do it by editing files in the /etc/pam.d directory.

/usr/share/doc/packages/pam/README.md5


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Steve Stites

My apologies.... I don't think I'm getting my question across.

For example, lets say I want to remove the password complexity requirements (when users change their password with the passwd command). Or, maybe I want to change the minimum password length (when users change their password with the passwd command).

I guess I'm talking about password changing, not so much what happens at login.

With that said, where do I go to configure this?

There is a config file you can edit for this. In most RedHat systems it is located at /etc/pam.d/system-auth. Being in Ubuntu at the moment, I can tell you it is at /etc/pam.d/common-password. Once you open the file, you should see a line that begins with the words password required. Here, you should hopefully see a min= or minlen= variable. Set it to the length you prefer.