User Management in Solaris 10

We’re back with Solaris 10 administration series. This time, it’s the user management part.

Securing the Password

For God knows why reason (probably legacy), the default password hashing algorithm in Solaris 10 is the classic UNIX DES hashing. To change it, edit /etc/security/policy.conf and find line starting with CRYPT_DEFAULT and change it to this:

CRYPT_DEFAULT=2a

(you can also set to other value but 2a should be good enough)

And to change the root password, first edit /etc/shadow and append $2a$ to the 2nd (password) field like this:

root:$2a$afgfdg....:...

or else chaning the root password using passwd won’t be set using the newly configured algorithm.

Creating User

First of all remember that there’s character limit of 8 for username in Solaris. Linux doesn’t have this but it’ll break ps (displaying UID instead of username). Also creating directory in /home is not possible because of several reasons. The proper way is to create home directory somewhere and create relevant entry in /etc/auto_home.

useradd -s /bin/bash newuser
mkdir -p /export/home/newuser
chown newuser:staff /export/home/newuser
printf "%st%sn" "newuser" "localhost:/export/home/newuser" >> /etc/auto_home
passwd newuser

This will let Solaris to automount (loopback filesystem/lofs) the actual directory (in this case /export/home/newuser) to /home.

Of course you can set the directory somewhere else, though having home not in /home feels weird.

Secure password, version 2

There’s this link for tutorial how to create secure and easy to remember passwords.

More or less it’s the same as the one I posted months ago, just now with character-to-symbol replacement method. Reducing the need to create unnecessary long sentence to get symbols etc.

[ [Read](http://kylehasegawa.com/content/the-perfect-password-plan) | [My old post](https://blog.myconan.net/posts/222) ]

_Last update 2011-07-11 10:31: markdown-fied, fixed link, added tags and categories_

Easy way to create rather secure and easy to remember password

Long title is looooooooooooong. LOL.

The steps:

* Create (long) sentences (usually two) that’s easy to remember and contains numbers and symbols (ex: I have smartly bought & waste money on manga that the anime has just aired this season, Zettai Karen Children, for $10. It’s a good read though!)
* Take first letter of each words, except for numbers and symbols (from above: Ihsb&wmomttahjats,ZKC,f$10.Iagrt!)
* That’s it, LOL. (and the example above is too long. 2 sentences with 5 word each should be sufficient 😛 )

Last update 2011-07-11 10:32: markdown-fied, tagged and categorized