Warning: Only try this at home! Using weak passwords on a computer that this is accessable from the wild and dark Internet, is tantamount to walking up to a spammer and saying “I’d simply love to be part of your zombie network—where do I sign up?”. I could safely do the following because this server is not accessible from the Internet and never will be, it’s a local test box for my own personal use.
I was creating a new user on a local CentOS 5.3 VirtualBox and while I was setting the password I received the following error: BAD PASSWORD: it is based on a dictionary word
After soul searching I found I didn’t feel coming up and then remembering a complicated enough password to make PAM happy, ie. not a dictionary word, long enough etc.
So instead I spent a while reading up on PAM—which, as it turns out, is a small team of alluring ladies and well worth stealing a look at.