This is a short post about changing NIS or local passwords for user accounts in FreeBSD. Changing password in FreeBSD, and there’s a command-line utility for this very purpose in FreeBSD is the passwd command.
If you’re not logged in with the super-user account, you’ll be asked for the current password before allowing you to change it.
If you’re a user on a FreeBSD server without admin privileges, you should change your password as soon as you receive the user credentials from the server admin.
We’re using FreeBSD version 10.3, but it should work out on older versions just fine.
What’s an appropriate password for a FreeBSD account?
The answer to this question is: as indecipherable as you can make it.
There’s, however, a guideline you can follow to make sure you’ve made your password strong enough to be sufficiently prone to common brute-force exploits:
- The password should have alphanumeric characters and preferably some special characters such as $,#,!, +, etc.
- The password includes as many characters as possible. The character limit for passwords on FreeBSD is 128.
- The alphabets should be in both upper case and lower case letters to increase the variables and to capitalize on Unix’s case sensitivity.
Also, you should NEVER do is to make your password the same as the login id.
How to change the password in FreeBSD
To change the password to your user account, issue the following command:
As mentioned earlier, if you’re not using the super account, you’ll be prompted to enter the current password before you’re allowed to change it to a new one. To keep anybody in your room from eavesdropping on the new password, FreeBSD doesn’t echo the characters you enter to assign the new password. And make sure not to make any typing errors, as it can seriously mess things up.
Wrapping up
That’s about it for this tutorial. You’ve learned how to change passwords in FreeBSD with the passwd command-line utility.
Server security is imperative, and a strong password is an indispensable part of it. So make sure to follow the FreeBSD guideline for creating a strong password. Also, for additional security, we’d recommend you change your password every month or so.
Hopefully, this lesson was helpful.
