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Changing your Password(s)

A password should contain 8 characters with at least one of each group: small letters, capital letters, digits and special symbols (punctuation marks etc.)
The easiest way to come up with a good password, is to construct a sentence and take the first letter of each word and make sure there are some digits and special symbols in it as well as in :

Damned, I hate to change my Password

Changing the to into 2, this gives: D,Ih2cmP

When you want to or are asked to change your (departmental) password(s), you need to :

  1. if you have an account on the departmental computer systems, login to one of its machines (*.cs.kuleuven.be) using ssh and use the passwd command to change your departmental password. This change is effective (almost) immediately.

    First you have to give your old password, then you have to enter your new password twice. 

    passwd
Enter login(LDAP) password: 

You can now choose the new password or passphrase.

A valid password should be a mix of upper and lower case letters,
digits, and other characters.  You can use a 10 character long
password with characters from at least 3 of these 4 classes, or
an 8 character long password containing characters from all the
classes.  An upper case letter that begins the password and a
digit that ends it do not count towards the number of character
classes used.

A passphrase should be of at least 3 words, 20 to 256 characters
long, and contain enough different characters.

Alternatively, if no one else can see your terminal now, you can
pick this as your password: "during=pace$former".

Enter new password: 
Re-type new password:
  2. if you have an account (intranet userid = [msru]-number) in the student computer room, you have to change your password on https://password.kuleuven.be/. This change is effective (almost) immediately.

  3. if you use a Samba server, login to samba.cs.kuleuven.be using ssh and use the smbpasswd command to change your SMB/Samba password.
    This change is effective immediately on samba.cs.kuleuven.be itself, but can take up to a couple of hours before it is propagated to the other departmental Samba servers.

  4. if you administer your own machine (desktop or portable), change your password(s) on that machine as well, as described here

Most services will need/use the new password immediately, some only the next day (cfr. this page)