I have set minimum password length to 3 on my RHEL 7 system. Still while using passwd I get error:
BAD PASSWORD: The password is shorter than 5 characters.
I have changed following parameters:
In /etc/security/pwquality.conf:
minlen = 3
And in /etc/login.defs:
PASS_MIN_LEN 3
How passwd is getting 5 as minimum length? Which config file I am missing?
Read the manual http://linux.die.net/man/5/pwquality.conf . Minimum length cannot be set to a value lower than 6. And if credits are enabled—which is the default—the computed score can be higher than you compute yourself.
grep pwquality /etc/pam.d/* and you will see where pam_pwquality.so is used. /etc/pam.d/passwd controls behaviour of passwd utility, /etc/pam.d/password-auth controls the behaviour of programs that use password authentication (e.g. ssh). try removing pam_pwquality.so from the password stanzas?
Oct 9, 2015 at 16:18
Tried with a fresh CentOS 7.4 install
authconfig --passminlen=12 --update
The command changes the parameter
minlen = 12
in
/etc/security/pwquality.conf
While on an older machine (wich I can no longer recover) the same command set the minimum length to 6, even if minlen was set to a higher value
Try to check if you have in /etc/pam.d
[root@host pam.d]# cat passwd
#%PAM-1.0
auth include system-auth
account include system-auth
password substack system-auth
[root@host pam.d]# cat system-auth
#%PAM-1.0
# This file is auto-generated.
# User changes will be destroyed the next time authconfig is run.
[...]
password requisite pam_pwquality.so try_first_pass local_users_only
[...]
