Authentication Configuration

The interface for this part is shown in Figure 3.9. Basically, you should select the following two options:

Figure 3.9: Authentication configuration

• Enable MD5 password: This option allows a long password (up to 256 characters) to be used instead of just 8 characters or less. This makes it very difficult (increasing the password complexity) to crack a password.
• Enable shadow password: Even though passwords are encripted, the password file is still readable by anybody in the system. Enabling this option will offer separating only passwords in /etc/shadow which is only readable by root.

The last option in the authentication configuration list is NIS. We recommend to delay setting this after finish assembling the cluster system. For more information about NIS please refer to Network Information Service Section