Just noticed something odd happened to two of my Linux servers. We have two dozen Ubuntu 18.04 LTS servers, and all of them ask us for a prompt in the same way:

# ssh admin@pl3poland

admin@pl3poland's password:

However, we recently started enforcing stronger password requirements on two servers. We changed the settings in /etc/pam.d/common-password for libpwquality.

Before:

password        requisite                       pam_pwquality.so retry=3 

After:

password        requisite                       pam_pwquality.so retry=3 minlen=12 difok=3 minclass=4 maxrepeat=2 dictcheck=1 usercheck=1

It seems that after these values were changed, now the password prompt shows up differently. This is what comes up now:

# spawn ssh admin@spain

Password:

This is a relatively minor difference, but it has affected a few of our automated routines where we use expect scripts to connect to systems. I've changed the script to look for "sword:" instead of the full "password:", but I'm just curious why that would change, and if there is any way to change it back?

Looking through documentation, I found a command called "password-prompt" but it does not look like that is something I can use to permanently set the password prefix.

Anyone able to direct me to a .conf file or some documentation that explains how to change this? I come from an AIX background, and there was a file called /etc/security/login.cfg that we could change to adjust the "herald" for each login. But I don't see something similar in Ubuntu.

Thx

Steve N.