Description of problem:
John the ripper does not support cracking in incremental mode of passwords
longer than 8 characters. But MD5 hashed passwords, the default scheme shipped
with fedora, support much longer length passwords. John as currently shipped can
not therefore be used reliably to check the integrity of passwords in
incremental mode.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
john-1.7.0.2-3.fc7

How reproducible:
always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. edit /etc/john.conf by changing MaxLen to a value greater than 8.
  
Actual results:
For instance if I set MaxLen = 14, john reports:

MaxLen = 14 exceeds the compile-time limit of 8

There are several good reasons why you probably don't need to raise it:
- many hash types don't support passwords (or password halves) longer than
7 or 8 characters;
- you probably don't have sufficient statistical information to generate a
charset file for lengths beyond 8;
- the limitation applies to incremental mode only.

Expected results:
john should run in incremental mode.


Additional info:
Since the minimum password length is 6 by default and john restricts the max
length to 8, incremental mode can only possibly crack a small number of
passwords. This is dependent on the average length of users' passwords of
course, but I know of some systems that use passwords longer than 8 characters.

If fedora ships with a default password scheme that allows for longer passwords
then john should have a more reasonable MaxLen compiled in.