required password length for users should be the same as pam.d/common-password

[Frank J. Andersen]

Binary package hint: gnome-system-tools

After doing clean install of Ubuntu 7.04 and patching, I create new user. I want to use 4 character password like '1234'. This fails as users-admin demands 6 characters.

Setting in /etc/pam.d/common-password IS 'min=4' !

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

agreed would be nice to have that also the max flag.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

sent upstream you can track it here: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=470897

[David Henningsson (diwic)]

There is also a minor error in the text, quote from user-password.c:

 else if (len < 6) {
  primary_text = _("Password is too short");
  secondary_text = _("User passwords must be longer than 6 characters and preferably "
                     "formed by numbers, letters and special characters.");

That is, length 6 is allowed, but the text claims that "must be longer than 6 characters", i e at least 7 characters.

Anyway, removing these lines altogether seems to be better than the current situation, where users-admin makes up its own non-configurable idea of what a proper password is. (I assume that trying to set a password that pam disallows will fail anyway.)

[Milan Bouchet-Valat (nalimilan)]

Yes, I'll have to fix that string, but that will be for Lucid+1.

We can't really remove these checks because when changing password for a user different than the current one, PAM doesn't check the password, which is set using 'chpasswd'. The current situation is pretty lame, but we'd have to parse PAM's config files in the backends and get the information from there... Using PAM in the backends would be better, but we don't support conversation in the protocol, and that would be very hard to implement without breaking all the other gnome-system-tools. Not likely to happen.