Hi Philip, On Friday, 1 March 2024 06:46:27 CET Philip Hands wrote: > Having helped people to install Linux for ~30 years, I'd say that it's > the norm for people to be almost incapable of coming up with a decent > password if they were not expecting the question.
I fully agree that most people use terrible passwords, due to decades of terrible advise about 'good' passwords: https://milliways.social/@mcfly/111187875394339616 https://xkcd.com/936/ On an *old* screenshot I had from d-i I found this: "A good password will contain a mixture of letters, numbers and punctuation" Fortunately that seems to have already been fixed :) I'll note that not every system needs strong security; some of my VMs have a terrible *root* password and that is/was deliberate. > If you want to make a constructive contribution, how about suggesting a > wording that reflects the advice that you think would be most useful to > the people that actually read the advice? It makes me sad if we assume that people won't even read it :( People not reading a 50+ page EULA, I can understand that. But a few lines of instruction/help when installing a fresh Operating System should not be too much to ask? Or am I completely out of touch with reality? >From MR 7: > It is possible (and generally recommended) to lock the 'root' (system > administrative) account, thus preventing direct password-based logins to > 'root'. I wasn't aware that that's now the recommended way to do things. An important reason why I responded was that I recently had to nuke a system with a locked root account because I couldn't get into emergency mode to fix a (rather simple) mistake. Due to this bug I found #802211 which seems to indicate it would've been possible (if setup in advance?). Had I known it. And apparently I'm the only one who's bothered by removing the root account screen, so go ahead. I'll find a way around it for myself. Cheers, Diederik
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