20.2. Setting Password Administrators
The Directory Manager can add the password administrator role to a user or a group of users. Since access control instructions (ACI) need to be set, it is recommended that a group is used to allow just a single ACI set to manage all password administrators. A password administrator can perform any user password operations, including the following:
- forcing the user to change their password,
- changing a user's password to a different storage scheme defined in the password policy,
- bypassing the password syntax checks,
- and adding already hashed passwords.
As explained in Section 20.1, “Setting User Passwords”, it is recommended that ordinary password updates are done by an existing role in the database with permissions to update only the
userPassword attribute. Red Hat recommends not to use the password administrator account for these ordinary tasks.
You can specify a user or a group as password administrator:
- In a local policy. For example:
# dsconf -D "cn=Directory Manager" ldap://server.example.com localpwp set ou=people,dc=example,dc=com --pwdadmin "cn=password_admins,ou=groups,dc=example,dc=com"
- In a global policy. For example:
# dsconf -D "cn=Directory Manager" ldap://server.example.com pwpolicy set --pwdadmin "cn=password_admins,ou=groups,dc=example,dc=com"
Note
You can add a new
passwordAdminSkipInfoUpdate: on/off setting under the cn=config entry to provide a fine grained control over password updates performed by password administrators. When you enable this setting, passwords updates do not update certain attributes, for example, passwordHistory, passwordExpirationTime, passwordRetryCount, pwdReset, and passwordExpWarned.
