That was probably the one thing I hated the most in Solaris. We would have various platforms linked up together via NIS, which was synced against our Windows 2000 domain controller (I know, sounds horrible. But it did work surprisingly well in its day). For all the jokes about Windows security, even that supported longer passwords. And users did occasionally notice when logging into Solaris eg when they accidentally typoed as they hit enter. All I could say was "yes, I know it seems dumb. It's Solaris and we can't do much about that."