[lug] MD5 strength?

[D. Stimits]

I am curious, for the MD5 password hash, is this currently considered 
strong, or is it easily broken by normal hardware? I have people telling 
me that password hash is useless and broken quite easily, and if this is 
about old style passwords, I agree...but with MD5, I do not believe that 
any real weakness, other than perhaps theoretical, has been found. If 
someone uses a buffer overflow attack to email the shadow file, and if 
the shadow file is MD5, what kind of difficulty would the attacker have 
at cracking non-common passwords (passwords not from a common words, 
where it must actually be broken instead of guessed)?

D. Stimits, stimits AT attbi.com