Hi Simon,
This is a limitation of the crypt() function in perl (and C). E.g.,
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypt_(C)
states that "The user's password is truncated to eight characters, and those are coerced down to only 7-bits each; this forms the 56-bit DES key."
This is relatively weak (but not terrible) encryption these days, and it's probably time to take a look at using a more sophisticated approach.
Jason
Installation
password setting
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