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Discussion on: 5 things to do before reinstalling your mac

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krkd

Thanks for your suggestions! Do you have any source of info about that thing you mention about not using very long passwords? I would like to read more about that topic before changing my passwords.

I can't give you any proper sources, unfortunately. Very few vendors tend to document that kind of behavior (for obvious reasons), so I can't offer anything more than my word, based on experiences.

  • Supermicro IPMI - the official maximum password length is 20 characters, has been for half a decade. In reality, everything that's longer than 20 characters will be trimmed and ignored.
  • IBM Sterling Supply Chain-products - the same applies here, the maximum password length is 20, but everything more than the minimum password length, 8 characters, gets trimmed and ignored. Additionally documentation states that usernames can not contain certain special characters such as ampersand. This also applies to passwords, you'll get a very useless error message when you try to use those.
  • SAP Data Access server has a maximum password length of 30. If you go over that, the software trims it down to 30 and adds a newline-symbol (???) before storing it. If you manually set the password-policy to a maximum length of 30 you'll be fine.

Those are concrete products I can name you from the top of my head. I've had disappointing experiences with European financial systems as well, but those are anecdotal and I'm not entirely willing to flat-out condemn those products because of that.