Select Your Language

Infrastructure and Management

Cloud Computing

Storage

Runtimes

Integration and Automation

  • Comments
  • Password rules are ignored by pam_cracklib.so

    Posted on

    O/S = Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server release 6.7 (Santiago)

    Hi, I am attempting to toughen up the password rules on an existing RHEL6 server but my modified /etc/pam.d/system-auth is not working. All I want to do is have the following....

    min length = 8 chars
    min lower case = 1
    min upper case = 1
    min digits =1

    I therefore changed this line:
    password requisite pam_cracklib.so try_first_pass retry=3 type=

    ..to read..
    password required pam_cracklib.so retry=3 minlen=8 dcredit=-1 ucredit=-1 lcredit=-1 ocredit=0 difok=3

    To test, I created a new account, assigned a simple password, then expired it using "chage -d0 ", logged in with simple password, it forced me to change it but it let me enter a password that didn't follow the rules such as all upper case when it needs at least 1 lower case for example.

    Any ideas?

    by

    points

    Responses

    Red Hat LinkedIn YouTube Facebook X, formerly Twitter

    Quick Links

    Help

    Site Info

    Related Sites

    © 2026 Red Hat