Heads up - Anaconda 22.17 will enforce 'good' passwords

[David Cantrell]

On Sun, Feb 01, 2015 at 09:53:05PM -0500, Matthias Clasen wrote:
> On Fri, 2015-01-30 at 14:03 -0800, Adam Williamson wrote:
> 
> > I think the main point is the one nirik made; I don't think the devs 
> > agree with your assessment of how significant this is. It's a minor 
> > inconvenience; you just have to come up with a password that passes 
> > the check, or use a kickstart. So I don't think they agree that it 
> > needs a full-blown security audit and FESCo review or whatever, 
> > because they don't think it's really that huge of a change in 
> > behaviour.
> 
> Having to come up with a password that passes the check is not 'a minor
> inconvenience'. Given how capricious libpwquality is about scoring
> (there have been some examples in this thread, there are more in
> gnome-initial-setup bugs), it is next to impossible.
> 
> This discussion has been pretty heated, but I agree with there being
> some aspect of 'collective punishment' here: just because _some_ systems
> get installed with sshd enabled, all users who install the Workstation
> have to spend a couple of frustrating minutes trying to find a password
> that gets them past this hurdle.
> 
> If this change stays, I anticipate the Workstation WG asking for a way
> to the workstation installer not enforce this. I know the anaconda folks
> are not eager to add variations like this, but that is exactly what we
> need: If you want to enforce product-specific policy in the installer,
> it needs to be a product-specific installer.

You're assuming before asking.  With the structure of the installer now, we
can look at changes like taking the password aspect and making it
product-specific controllable by a number of different methods.  Our
historic aim to end variant specifics in the installer was because the old
code (and variants) lacked a way to assign owners to those product
specifics, which meant that requests of the installer to be product specific
meant we were asked to be the owners of those specifics.

-- 
David Cantrell <dcantrell at redhat.com>
Manager, Installer Engineering Team
Red Hat, Inc. | Westford, MA | EST5EDT