On occasion you may be called upon to clear a users password history so a previous password can be reused. This, from a security standpoint, is a bad thing, however sometimes needs must.
As root in the AIX server (6.1) :
chuser histsize=0 username # stop recording passwords pwdadm username # change password pwdadm -f NOCHECK username # do not check user password on login |
Now get user to log in with the password you have set and they should then use passwd command to change to the password they want.
When they are done :
chuser histsize=5 username # reset to default |
I noticed on AIX 7.1 this did not work. The user already had histsize set to 0.
It worked however when I did :
chuser histexpire=0 username |
After the user set his password as required I set it back to the original value, which in this case was 26.
