• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

vFrank

Essense of virtualization

  • LinkedIn
  • RSS
  • Twitter

Password complexity ESXi

April 27, 2011 by FrankBrix Leave a Comment

I have a lot of ESXi servers running in my lab and prefer to have a very simple password. This password could be “vmware”. A six letter word all in lower case. Not the most secure password, but in my lab environment it is not a worry.

The password complexity is defined in the file: “/etc/pam.d/system-auth” you need to look at line 12:  “password   requisite    /lib/security/$ISA/pam_passwdqc.so retry=3 min=8,8,8,7,6″ This is actually what defines the password complexity. The way to interpret “8,8,8,7,6” is the following: The first 8 is how long the password has to be if we only use a single character set (lower case, upper case, digtigts, other characters.). The second 8 is if we use two character classes The third is for password phrases and the last two is for 3 and 4 character classes password.

I want to use the password “vmware” a single character word with a length of 6. To accomplish this we change line 10 to one of the following:

  1. password   requisite    /lib/security/$ISA/pam_passwdqc.so retry=3 min=6,6,6,6,6
  2. password   requisite    /lib/security/$ISA/pam_passwdqc.so retry=3 min=8,8,8,7,6 enforce=none

The change will take affect immediately. No need to restart any services. Now go ahead and change your password with the “passwd” command.

The only thing you have to worry about is that the system-auth is not persistent through reboots. Your password is persistent but the file is not. To make sure the system-auth file is backed up you need to:

chmod +t /etc/pam.d/system-auth

Filed Under: Uncategorized

Reader Interactions

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Primary Sidebar

Blogroll

  • Hazenet
  • Michael Ryom
  • Perfect Cloud
  • vTerkel

Copyright © 2023 · News Pro on Genesis Framework · WordPress · Log in