Password Please

apg: for all my random password needs.

For both WordPress.org (support) Forum and WordPress.com I regularly find myself setting people — the Net is a new password email eater, or the password is a false-positive spam, or there are misconfigured email accounts and servers.
Family and friend request for help setting up a computer or web service — it frightens me how often years later they are still using that dumb or obvious password.

A good password written down in a safe place is much better than a dumb password you can easily remember.

To ease my conscience of giving someone a bad password, I have long depended on PC Tools Secure Password Generator.

Today, I was tired of loading it in the browser, so I searched for a Ubuntu Linux command line solution.

I first came across solutions by scripting masters like head -c 10 < /dev/random | uuencode -m - | tail -n 2 |d -n 1 before discovering apg.

sudo aptitude install apg

And I got back to providing passwords.

One Comment

  1. Posted March 22, 2007 at 1:37 am | Permalink

    This looks interesting.

    Maybe a little more scientific than my current method of giving other people starter passwords - keyboard bashing till I have a long random password string. :-)

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