[G4] Passwords

[Dennis B. Swaney]

At 11:18 AM -0800 12/11/04, Perry The Cynic wrote:
>Nothing in the system remembers your old passwords. It would be a 
>pretty bad idea to do so. In fact, most parts of the system don't 
>even know your *current* password - it just knows how to recognize 
>it when you type it.
>
>If you want to put all your passwords into a "backup place," use the 
>keychain facility. It can actually keep many of your passwords 
>online right there (and Safari, Mail, etc. use them automatically). 
>For strictly "backup" use, you may want to create a separate 
>keychain file, stuff all your important secrets there, put the file 
>on a USB disk or burn a CD-ROM with it (or both), and put it in a 
>safe place. It's also a good idea to have a copy out of the house 
>(leave it with a friend); remember that it's quite safe as long as 
>your friend doesn't know the password you put on that keychain.
>
>Naturally, you *don't* want to forget that password. Nobody can get 
>it back for you. But since you don't actually use it for anything 
>but your backup keychain, you don't have to change it a lot, and you 
>can afford to make it long and intuitively obvious (to you :-).
>

Unfortunately, the Keychain has never worked properly. It will offer 
to remember some, but not all. If it can't keep track of ALL of them 
then it is worthless to me.

Personally, the password demands of OS X border on paranoia. I can 
see the reason if the computer is SHARED with other users, but if 
there is only ONE user, then there should be a way to turn off all 
but the root & admin ones. Since I am the only user, I suppose that I 
could "standardize" on three:
root, admin, everything else.
-- 
Sincerely,
Dennis B. Swaney

"Windows is a command-line OS with a GUI shell while Mac System 10 is 
... oh, never mind."