Passwords are very important. The majority of time you hear about computers getting "hacked" is because one (or more) users picked very simple passwords that others could easily guess.
A good password is between 6 and 8 characters long and is a mixture of upper and lower letters (A-Z, a-z), numbers (0-9) and "special" characters (!@#()$%^&*). You should generally not use personal information such as you birthday or the name(s) of children or pets. These items could be easily "guessed" by people trying to break into your account.
For example, the password 031557 would not be good if my birthday was March 15, 1957. Also, using decklan (the name of one of our past horses) would be a bad idea. Both of these are too easy to figure out.
A good password might be Qw3@d$s which many people find
hard to memorize. A good password is not always the simplest thing
to remember - it should require some thought on your part!
An easy way
to create a good password is think of a phrase and create an acronym
from it. For example, I might use the phrase "I teach five classes at night!"
to come up with the password It5C@n! which is a pretty secure
password. Alternating upper/lower case letters, inclusion of numbers and
special characters always helps.
Once you've thought of a good password, you can change it anytime with the yppasswd command. You must be logged into a linux workstation in the lab or linus-public.highpoint.edu. If you are logged into your laptop or a iMac in the lab, your will need to ssh username@linus-public.highpoint.edu to change your password.
Open a terminal window, at the UNIX prompt, execute the yppasswd command. It will ask you for you old password, and then ask you to enter a new password twice (to make sure you typed it correctly). Keep in mind that you will not see any characters on the screen when you enter the passwords.
You should change your password TODAY, and every few months during the semester.