allowed characters in User-Password?

[Nils-Henner Krueger]

I tried to replace a very old Livingston RADIUS installation by
FreeRadius 1.0.1 (using the Solaris pkg from Blastwave).

I used the "compat = cistron" directive to simply continue with
the existing users file for a first test.

At first sight everything worked fine but after following the
log for a while it turns out that (too) many users were rejected.

All the rejected accounts have a "%" sign in the User-Password.

Are there any restrictions on the character set used for the
User-Password attribute? Which special chars are forbidden? 
Where can I find information on that subject?

How can I get around this problem? There are a few thousand
dialin accounts, out of them about 300 have a "%" in the password
so I can't simply call them and solve that directly, not speaking
about other chars that might make trouble, too.


Thanks for help!

nhk