In Red Hat Enterpise 4 how do I implement this


Passwords must contain at least 3 of the following: lowercase alpha, uppercase alpha, numeric and special character.

look at your username- CsaunDERs07! just mix it up a little-its not hard.

whoops, my bad, let me rephrase, how do i force this on users?

force this? meaning? you want to make it hard for a user to access root? is that what you're saying?

I think you're going to want to look for something called pam_cracklib. in teh /etc/pam.d/system-auth file, you can add a line like:
password required /lib/security/pam_cracklib.so

The cracklib.so modules does password strenght checking. I believe it looks for similar passwords, dictionary words, repeated letters, etc. There may be additional options with it to require min length, one number, one uppercase, one lowercase, and one special char.

I think that the pam security files are well documented. Hopefully, this will get you in the right direction.

Yes, what you want is to configure pam_cracklib by adding specific options to it. You would set up the options dcredit, ucredit, ocredit. See man pam_cracklib for details on these options. I don't think it is possible to do exactly as you have described, but you could force them to have at least one of each type of character or something similar. If you really want to have exactly those rules you could write your own pam module.

You should also take a look at man pam.d. It will clue you in on where to look for the pam configuration files. On FC6 it is accomplished in a combination of files. /etc/pam.d/passwd which has includes that point to /etc/pam.d/system-auth a symbolic link of /etc/pam.d/system-auth-ac. In there you should find pam_cracklib.so and be able to add the options to it. man pam gives a good overview of how it all fits together.

Bill