For security reasons there are certain restrictions governing the choice of usernames and passwords on ARCHER2.
Passwords
Password quality or strength will be assessed and controlled such that we can support both complex, shorter passwords and long but comparatively simple passwords. For example both “LA10!£lsty” and “horsebatterystaple” would be supported.
This flexibility is supported by offering users “credits” against the minimum length of the password, allowing a password to be shorter by one character for each “credit” offered for using a different character type.
For ARCHER2:
- A minimum password length of 18 is set.
- 2 credits are made available for using lower case letter characters.
- 2 credits are made available for using upper case letter characters.
- 2 credits are made available for using numerical characters.
- 2 credits are made available for using punctuation characters.
This will in effect create a minimum password length which will vary between 10-16 characters depending on number of types of character used.
Additionally:
- A minimum of 5 characters from a new password must not be present in the old password.
- There will be no requirement to use multiple character types.
- A maximum of 2 consecutive identical characters will be permitted.
- A dictionary check will be applied to verify that the password is not composed of or based upon a single word.
Usernames
Usernames are standardised and the rules governing them are:
- Must be a maximum of 31 characters in length
- Only alpha-numeric characters, underscore and hyphen allowed (no special charcters eg $,@)
- Lowercase only
- Must start with a letter
- Must not be the same as a groupname on ARCHER2
If you have any questions about the choice of passwords OR usernames on ARCHER2, please contact The ARCHER2 Service Desk.
Update Logs
- 2020-05-05 Minor Updates
- 2020-03-13 Copied from ARCHER and Updated for ARCHER2