John Summerfield wrote:
There is quite a deal of well-reasoned debate about what constitutes a good password.
"bismcoles" would probably be easy for Bill Smith to remember, and would certainly defy any dictionary attack. As would "bluewatermelon."
Both of these could be part of a dictionary attack. Consider most straight plain text to be part of a dictionary attack.
The expect package has a password generator that creates passwords like this, but again they're hard to remember: "et3tUfGd."
A better example is Blu3w4terme7on, easier to remember but you need to come up with some kind of rules for remembering it. For myself, I prefer passphrases. I find them easier to remember, such as mUst4rd&Tuna_F1sh. A silly example but I've used sillier. Sometimes funnier works well (easy to remember).
A reasonable security system would shut down the login process for a time after some number of consecutive failed login attempts. It's a rule that's been around for a long time, it's even in Linux, but implemented poorly.
I've used pam_abl and it works quite well, it's 3 strikes (adjustable) and you're locked. It can automatically unlock after a setting of time and has additional features which make it pretty flexible. -- Linux Home Automation Neil Cherry ncherry@xxxxxxxxxxx http://www.linuxha.com/ Main site http://linuxha.blogspot.com/ My HA Blog http://home.comcast.net/~ncherry/ Backup site
