How to Manage Password Aging in Solaris, AIX, and Linux

LogoIts possible that sometime in your short, meaningless life, you may need to create an account that has a password that is set to never expire. This is somethimes the case with headless accounts and specialty accounts such as the type you might have to setup for monitoring or security scanning. You might also find yourself setting up shared headless accounts that have locked passwords in order to block direct logins. This second scenario can be especially troublesome when this is some sort of application or database user with cron jobs, as even an account without a password and expire and lock. If this occurs all of a users cron jobs will fail. All because the account expired.