[Anonymouse]

Originally Posted by homealone

setting 'strong' passwords has been imposed on us at work - a right pain, but it exposes my laziness. I usually rotate 3 passwords which mix upper/lower case as well as a number or two, our system looks back over the last 4, so I had to make a new one, today .... bet I forget it

Think yourself lucky you're not on VAX/VMS, then. VMS remembers every password, and since VMS 5 (can't remember where they're up to now), once a password expires or is changed, it can never be used again, by anyone. Not even the sysops can do anything about that; the password file is encrypted, it moves around randomly on the system disk and there is no command in VMS that allows them to access it at all; only the system itself can do that. The most they can do is to reset a password to a default if a user forgets - and to maintain security, the reset password expires immediately the user logs in and s/he is required to set a new password.