Ubuntu – Any reason to have a strong user password

password

I recently decided to change my (very) strong user password to something trivial.

This was mostly to eliminate frustration with typing a long password each time I sudo or whatever.

My question is, is there any reason to have a strong user password? considering that most services which I run on my box do not use PAM for auth:

apache2 – uses .htpasswd for access
sshd – only private keys allowed
transmissiond – uses its own http auth
mpd – uses its own auth
samba – limited to LAN

Physical access to the box is out of the question.

Best Answer

The reason to have a password is the reason to have a strong or even a very strong password, one of the reasons being to protect you from unauthorized access.

If you are certain that your PC is absolutely safe that it doesn't need a password, you may want to have a look at these questions:

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – set the user account to have no password

You can't do that using the GUI tool, but you can using the terminal.

First, if your user has sudo privileges, you must enable its NOPASSWD option. Otherwise, sudo will ask for a password even when you don't have one, and won't accept an empty password.

To do so, open the sudoers configuration file with sudo visudo, and add the following line to the file, replacing david with your username:
```
david ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD:ALL
```
Close the editor to apply the changes, and test the effect on sudo in a new terminal.
Delete the password for your user by running this command:
```
sudo passwd -d `whoami`
```

If you ever get prompted for a password, just type enter and it should work. I've tested this answer with LightDM, the lock screen, sudo, gksu and it works, but there's one more step to get it to work with pkexec (thanks muru).

Ubuntu – Change password on root user and user account

To do it using command line:

To change the root password:

sudo passwd

To change your user password:

passwd

To change other users password:

sudo passwd USERNAME

To do it GUI open the application User Accounts from the Dash and there you can change password easily for all users unless the root

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – set the user account to have no password

Ubuntu – Change password on root user and user account

Related Question