Hello 9fans,

I'm trying to understand whether there are technical reasons for us (9front) 
having a 27-character limit on auth passwords.

On 9front, this can be traced back to PASSWDLEN defined in authsrv.h. That 
constant was split off from ANAMELEN in commit 3c622887, and /doc/prog4.ms 
mentions that ANAMELEN is a vestige of when 9p used fixed 28-character buffers 
for paths, defined as NAMELEN.

And this is where the trail runs cold. I am unable to find out why ANAMELEN 
exists at all. Key derivation functions should be able to handle arbitrary 
length passwords, so ostensibly PASSWDLEN is not needed in principle. Is this 
just a historical quirk, or am I missing something?

I'm thinking it might be interesting to say something about this at iwp9, so 
any thoughts or discussion here is quite welcome.

Cheers,
B. Wilson

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