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.
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.
My colleague Noel Jackson suggests `apg -t -m 12 -M SNCL` which means make the length of the password 12 characters and always require special symbol characters, numbers and both lower and capital letters.