In message <200103230338.PAA26574@pagoda.wgtn.cat-it.co.nz>, Ewen McNeill write
s:
>If you use DES passwords (the standard in Unix for many many years, but
>a lot of Unixes are moving away from it), then only 8 characters of the
>password are significant, because of the way the password is used.  (The
>lower seven bits of the first 8 bytes are used to make a DES key, which
>then encrypts a well known block, to get the password hash stored in the
>password file.)

Just to warn people who might run into this:  BSD/OS has an algorithm
available which uses 128 characters but still does DES.

-s