joe shaw

Your Novell innerweb password will expire in 30 days.

Ah, it’s that time again. Time to change my internal Novell password. An opportunity that comes but once a quarter.

Looking at the post-it note on my desk that contains my current Novell password and several previous ones, I roughly estimate that this will be password change #15.

It’s interesting to look back on my password choosing strategies over the past four years. I started out with a great password. It was a variation on one I used for my personal computer roughly a decade ago. A great mix of upper and lower case letters, numbers, and punctuation. It was laid out so that it was easy to type quickly with two hands but difficult to determine if you watched my hands as I typed it. Truly a work of art. Of course, I am my harshest critic, and if there was any single weakness, it was that it was only eight or nine characters long. I’m not saying it should go into the Louvre or anything, but it was a solid effort.

The first couple of times I had to change it, I’d do the minimum required by the policy: change one letter and one number — a trivial password to crack if you know the policy and have compromised the old password. But that’s not why I decided to move on from this method, though. I changed mainly because I found myself confusing the differences between my current and older passwords. Did I change that S to a P or that p to an s? Was the number 343 or 434?

So the next thing I did was to take locations of armed American conflicts, turn them into l33t speak, and throw some numbers and/or punctuation on there. That way they’d be easier to differentiate. So I had things like vi3tn4m, etc. In the end, though, I was forced to stop this because I ran out of armed American conflicts. So these days I mainly use l33t speak variations of derogatory phrases about how much I hate the Novell password policy.

It’s nice to see some things never change.

(Ok, I lied. I didn’t really run out of armed American conflicts. I was inconsistent at best in the ones I chose, and I went through them chronologically. So while I did use some lesser “police action” conflicts gr3n4d4 and p4n4M4 I skipped ones like r4\/\/4nD4 and K0s0\/0.)