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Hi all,



I am looking for some assistance in setting up a local password policy for my Macs that are not bound to AD. Right now, they all have a generic password set, but due to increased security standards, we need them all to require a password to unlock the screensaver (which is now set to kick on after 15 minutes).



Is there a way to force a user to change that generic local password? And if there is, can we force it to match our AD password policy (8 char, 1 upper, 1 #, etc)?



I see the OS - Local Password Policy in the extension attributes, but can't decipher how to make that work on my machines.



Any help would be greatly appreciated.



Thanks.
Lindsay

Check into using pwpolicy from the command line to do this. You should be able to use it to set the password policy on the local machine.



Apple Man Page - https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/#documentation/Darwin/Reference/Manpages/man8/pwpolicy.8.html



An article at AFP548 - http://www.afp548.com/article.php?story=20040926173146494



And another about doing this on 10.7 - http://forums.macrumors.com/archive/index.php/t-1308882.html

Thanks Steve. That stuff did the trick. Still trying to figure out if I can force an upper and lowercase character, but overall, this is exactly what I was looking for.

As far as I'm aware, pwpolicy isn't granular to the point of differentiating upper and lowercase.

check other options to see if they'll work. there's some evidence options other than the ones in the man page will work.



http://lists.apple.com/archives/fed-talk/2011/Jan/msg00032.html



note the "requiresMixedCase=1" and "requiresSymbol=1" options, specifically.

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