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I usually just make up a crazy long sentence I'll remember, with no logical order in it. Something funny to me so I'll easily remember it. Throw in some assortment of numbers and symbols. Bam! Works like a charm!

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Then the sysadmin hits you with a "at least 8 characters, no more than 13, one uppercase, one lowercase, a number, a special character, but not one that can't be encoded in EBCDIC and the password must differ in at least three places from the last 10 you used."

No more than three consecutive letters. That's when things get tedious.

Entropy? What's that.

Ah. Last Friday at work I changed my password. It worked fine when I unlocked my computer after stepping away. On the way home, I noticed that my iPhone wasn't updating email, and recalled that I hadn't changed the password there. But I could not get the iPhone to accept my password. Nor could I get Outlook webmail to accept it. I was afraid that I might have to trouble one of the network admins, but I tried the VPN client. That accepted the password. I RDPed into a machine on the internal network, changed the password to something a little shorter, and confirmed that Exchange was OK with it.

As I recall, the boundary was somewhere around 20 characters.

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