Good story! nostr:note1m4aqzslghfpw2z0a306278vl8equpef8khassf557u67ea9ge6ws9v22fh
Discussion
"a$$word" made me laugh more than it should have 😆
Also, while I did immediately guess it was the length that mattered, i would never have guessed that Solaris did something as ridiculous as that.
Believe it or not some of my first software engineering work was on Solaris servers back in 1999 or so. They were very common in academia and industry in the late 90s iirc.
Solaris is kinda known of doing various things differently, although still according to UNIX standards.
From Sun machines I have only touched some Ultra workstation, friend of me had bought two of them in eBay somewhere in mid-2000s (he was a big fan of SPARC as a CPU arch).
About truncating passwords - I remember Windows doing something similar in Windows 98 / Windows NT4 times. Or was it NetBIOS specific? Don’t remember exact details now.