FreeBSD: Password expiry / aging policy

For security reason you must enable Password expiry policy on FreeBSD box. Linux comes with chage command, which changes the number of days between password changes and the date of the last password change.

FreeBSD pw command

Use pw command to setup password expiry date for existing user account. Syntax is as follows:
pw user mod USERNAME -p DD-MMM-YY

Where,

• -p DD-MMM-YY: Set the account’s password expiration date.

For example, expire user rocky’s password on 31-Mar-2006:
# pw user mod USERNAME -p 31-mar-06
Use pw command to setup password expiry while creating new user account.
pw user add USERNAME -p DATE -e DAYS:
Where,

• -p DAYS: Set default account expiration period in days
• -e DAYS: Set the account’s expiration date.

For example create a user called didi and Set the default password expiration to 30 days.
# pw user add didi -p 30 -d /home/didi -m
# passwd didi
This is good if you have small number of users. For large installation base (such as University computers) you need to define user login class. With login class you can control the following :

• Resource limits
• Accounting limits
• Authentication limits
• Default user environment settings.