Fear and Loathing in Les Rambles/ blog/ Configuring-an-old-Debian-system

Chris,

Please note that the method you recommend for activating libpam-cracklib only applies to lenny and earlier; it's obsolete for the upcoming squeeze release (and in Ubuntu 8.10 and later), where libpam-cracklib is integrated with pam-auth-update and will be autoconfigured. Running your sed command on a squeeze system will break pam-auth-update integration, and cause the admin headaches going forward if they ever have occasion to use anything other than pam_unix for authentication.

So for a squeeze system, this should be:

apt-get install libpam-cracklib

... and you're done!

Actually, the package defaults in squeeze are stronger than what you've listed: libpam-cracklib will set minlen=8 by default (instead of the uselessly-weak minlen=6), and coming soon, pam_unix should default to sha512 instead of md5 for password hashing.