[MacTUG] OS X password length limit... not eight characters?

[Mike Patterson]

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On 2010/12/14 8:50 AM, Ian Turner wrote:
> and further in the OD Admin manual (some history which explains the 
> original post - note it refers to OSX 10.0, which as noted below used 
> Crypt passwords)

Some of what you quoted seems a bit misleading, see below... this isn't
your fault, of course, but I'm curious and a bit taken aback so I wanted
to raise it where Somebody Official Might See It.  :-)

> About Shadow Passwords
[..]
> computer as the directory domain where the user account resides. Because 
> the password is not stored in the user account, the password is not easy 
> to capture over the network.

I fail to see how this is true.  You use shadow passwords to ensure that
somebody with local access to a machine (authorized or not) requires
escalated privileges in order to see the password hashes.  Using shadow
files can't protect you from network sniffing and was never intended to.

> About Crypt Passwords
> A crypt password is stored in a hash in the user account. This strategy, 
> historically named basic authentication,

I'm not sure what history the manual is referring to here.  I've only
ever heard of basic authentication being used with respect to web-based
authentication; basic versus digest.  On Unix machines, the use of crypt
said nothing at all about shadowed password files or not.

Granted, some of what the manual was talking about is possibly/probably
with respect only to Apple methods, but it strikes me as confusing at
best to overload the terms in the ways what Ian quoted seem to imply.  :\

Mike

- -- 
No one now dies of fatal truths; there are too many antidotes to them.
 - Friedrich Nietzsche
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