Long complex password is almost compulsory for most organisations
for service or administrator accounts. When you ask the security team they will
say use the longest and most complex password that the system will accept.
Usually this includes a combination of uppercase, lowercase, special characters
and numbers.
I am happy to comply with this request and it can be a pain
to type these long complex passwords without getting it wrong. Over the years
there is one thing I have noticed and that is to be careful when using special
characters, especially if you have systems in different countries that have
different keyboard layout for that particular system.
For example on a "US" keyboard the “@” sign is above the
number 2 where on a "UK" keyboard it is by the Enter key.
Reason I am highlighting this is because there has been times
where I have logged on to a “jump” (RDP) box to access various systems and not
realised that the keyboard on that system was set to "US" or something else. I
could be using my mac/windows desktop where the keyboard layout is set to "UK" and
would be typing away the password and the system would not be accepting my
password which sometimes end up locking the account out. This could be very
frustrating if you was trying to resolve a major problem.
So please in future when you are setting these long complex password,
have a think about what keyboard layout your administrators could be using and
select characters where the positions of those keys are the same for their
layouts too. Hopefully this will prevent system administrators from making
mistakes like me and possibly locking out a very important account.
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