OT: password crackers

[Phillip Susi]

Toby Kelsey wrote:
<snip>
> I'm worried an attempt might succeed on an automatically generated username.
> The users with valid shells in /etc/passwd are:
> root daemon bin sys sync games man lp mail news uucp proxy www-data
> backup list irc gnats nobody toby zac fetchmail guest backuppc
> 

All of the default accounts have locked passwords, so that isn't a 
problem.  sshd should also be configured to not allow root logins ( not 
sure if it is by default in ubuntu, but probably is, and root's password 
is locked by default anyhow ) and ideally, only allow authentication 
with RSA keys and not passwords.  That will prevent anyone from brute 
forcing their way in.