Enforcing password complexity in ubuntu
 

I must be losing it because I can't seem to find my answer on the google mechine. I need to enforce password complexity in ubuntu. I need min length, upper case, number and or special characters. I don't want to have to install pam_cracklib on all these boxes. I have looked at he common-password and it's not much help. Thanks for any help you can give.

The pam_unix.so module can enforce a minimum character length, and the obscure option enforces complexity "based on the length of the password and the number of different types of characters (alpha, numeric, etc.) used".

I've used both pam_cracklib (rather cryptic) and pam_passwdqc (more straightforward) for this purpose. If you can't afford to install either, you're probably going to be tweaking pam_unix (as noted above). That should certainly be in place already.