[techtalk] logins

[Amanda Owens]

On Wed, 27 Oct 1999, Nicole wrote:

> > I think Nicole was talking about the login being all numbers, and not the
> > password.  The only reason I can see this causing problems is because of
> > the fact that UIDs are based on numbers...who knows...aaron doesn't ;)
> 
> Yup, it was the login that was all numbers. I wasn't sure just how special
> numbers are.
> 
> Turns out the *password* had a leading special character... a ' or
> ; or something like that (ahh how my memory fails me).
> 

How very odd. Now, I know on the sun, my password with a ':' in it takes 
the colon as some kinda escape char instead of a colon, so doesn't work. 
However, it *does* start with a 'special' character - and the whole thing 
works fine on Linux.

Now, my Sys-admin husband once told me of a co-worker who inadvertantly 
changed root password on a system to - ^X^X^X^X^X - or something along 
those lines. He was hitting control-x to get out of the password program, 
and managed to set the password to it. So, even very odd passwords work. 
I've heard of people who get returns in their password. Spaces are 
popular. Control-characters work, too. 

It's very strange, and depends on the protocol your password uses, but 
you can use some very wierd keystrokes much of the time. :)

Mur!


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