On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 12:56:33PM -0400, Ted Unangst wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 27, 2014 at 16:50, Stefan Wollny wrote:
> > Hi misc@-readers!
> >
> > I have once more read man afterboot(8) and a question came up related
> > to the superuser's password.
> >
> > In section 'root password' advisory is given to "choose a password
> > that has digits and special characters (not space)". This last advice
> > is what I do not understand - all of my passwords have spaces,
> > including root's, and I never noticed any drawbacks. Actually I
> > consider spaces within a password to be a security feature making it a
> > 'passphrase' which should be harder to crack (yes - it is as looong
> > password for root ;-) )
> >
> > Now: Is this advice in afterboot(8) 'out-of-date' or am I just lucky?
>
> I can't think of a reason why it wouldn't work. I might stay away from
> control characters and unicode because you may have keyboard / byte
> sequence translation issues, but space should be reliable enough.
>
> The only place I can think spaces would be a problem is command line
> arguments, which 1) affects other characters as well 2) is a bad idea.
I never read that advise and hgave been using passwords with spaces for
many years.
Passwords to be entered in webforms is another story, of course ;-)
-Otto
