Windows password expiration

[Gerald Carter]

"BDCSA Inc." wrote:
> 
> Correct me if I am wrong but doesnt the unix system already
> have a password expiration mechanism built into its core ????

If supporting shadow password, then yes I believe so.

> Can't you pull the neccessary info from there rather than
> adding more fields into smbpassword file or smb.conf

We are not adding any more fields to smbpasswd.  Trust me 
on this one :)

> I persoanlly feel that password expiration is a very
> important and critical aspect of good password security.

People are often very divided on this.  Password expiration
can sometimes for people to simply use a list of passwords 
and rotate them (also forcing them to remember more passwords
and often choose simplier passwords in order to help alleviate
the difficulty).  But I digress....  :-)

Yeah.  I suppose we could pull that information from 
/etc/shadow.  Whether or not that is a good idea, I'm not 
sure.  In the case of a simple smbpasswd, this makes complete
sense to do so.  In the case of a full SAM implementation
such as with an DB backend (follow the passdb thread 
on samba-technical for more information on this), I'm not sure.

Hmmm...that would mean we need to know at compile time if the
system supports shadow passwords.  I'll look into this.  We
may check for that already.






Cheers, jerry
----------------------------------------------------------------------
   /\  Gerald (Jerry) Carter                     Professional Services
 \/    http://www.valinux.com/  VA Linux Systems   gcarter at valinux.com
       http://www.samba.org/       SAMBA Team          jerry at samba.org
       http://www.plainjoe.org/                     jerry at plainjoe.org

       "...a hundred billion castaways looking for a home."
                                - Sting "Message in a Bottle" ( 1979 )