Changing your password

When you login to your account for the first time, you should immediately change your password. We strongly suggest that you also change it again every few weeks. If you choose a guessable password, the system administrators may summarily close your account. We will not remove your files, but we may suspend your login privileges to protect the system.

Unfortunately, choosing a secure password is complicated by the sophisticated technology available to system intruders.

DON'T use passwords that

• are your name, your login name, or a trivial variation thereof (if your name is John Q. Public, public1, JohnqP, and JpUbL!c are all very bad passwords)
• any variation of a proper name of a person or place (clinTon, 9gandalf)
• have less than six characters (numbers, letters, or symbols)
• are words in any dictionary (English or otherwise!)
• are simple misspellings or reversals of words (fuzion, raazab), or words appended with numbers (zebra3)
• are sequences of keys on a typewriter (qwertyui) or in the alphabet (abc123)

So, you may be asking what works. You should use passwords with more than six characters, and which look random but which you can remember. Use punctuation characters, different case letters, and odd symbols in your password. One effective strategy is to choose a short phrase that you can easily remember, and make an acronym out of it. For example, the phrase ``Why, would someone break into my account?'' might become

w,W$b!ma

which would be very difficult for someone to guess.

To change your password on the Unix workstations, type yppasswd at the prompt. You will be asked to enter your old password once and your new password twice.