topic Re: script to generate a password in Operating System - HP-UX

script to generate a password

Doug_3 — Thu, 17 Apr 2003 15:29:09 GMT

Hi all,

The ops mgr wants to alter an outside vendor's password each day. I could not find anything canned and don't really want to roll my own. It would need to generate a new password and email the operators the new password.

Any scripts out there? We are on 11.00 untrusted system.

If there is nothing ready to use ideas on how to generate that password?

Thanks in advance,
Doug

Re: script to generate a password

Pete Randall — Thu, 17 Apr 2003 15:32:58 GMT

Doug,

Attached is a rather ugly, very homegrown script to generate a four character password, all alpha. You could adapt it to whatever lenght you need.

Pete

Re: script to generate a password

Darren Prior — Thu, 17 Apr 2003 15:44:26 GMT

Hi Doug,

You might be introducing a bit of a security hole if you are emailing plaintext passwords from the server...

Perhaps the vendor could supply you with a list of a month's worth of pre-encrypted passwords; then you could have a cron job that moves the pre-encrypted passwords into place?

regards,

Darren.

Re: script to generate a password

Doug_3 — Thu, 17 Apr 2003 16:25:24 GMT

Thanks Darren, Pete. The script will work fine!

There should be no security hole as I am not sending them out of the server, just to the operator account avail in the server.

Thanks Again to you both.

Doug

Re: script to generate a password

Geoff Wild — Thu, 17 Apr 2003 16:42:35 GMT

Here's a good one in C.

Generates a random password - very hard to crack - will pass just about any security audit...

Rgds...Geoff

Re: script to generate a password

John Poff — Thu, 17 Apr 2003 16:50:05 GMT

Hi,

Here is a little Perl script I use to generate 'ugly' passwords that make our security guy happy:

#!/usr/bin/perl

# ugly_password.pl

# This script will generate a random password 16 characters long using
# upper and lower case alphabetical characters, numbers, and special
# characters.

@chars = ( "A" .. "Z", "a" .. "z", 0 .. 9, qw(! @ # $ % ^ & _ - [ ] { }) );
$password = join("", @chars[ map { rand @chars } ( 1 .. 16 ) ]);

print "New password is $password\n";

JP

P.S. Merijn should be happy. I actually do a little bit of scripting [not enough] in Perl. ;)

Re: script to generate a password

Dave La Mar — Thu, 17 Apr 2003 19:00:24 GMT

For Geoff -
Hope you return to this thread.
I've tried your cprog but < > are still generated. I've tried quoting and double quoting in the define but they are still generated. ???

dl

Re: script to generate a password

Geoff Wild — Mon, 21 Apr 2003 13:37:17 GMT

Dave,

Strange = the c program was developed on a Solaris box - I've tried compiling on HPUX 11.11 - to no avail - on Solaris those characters never show up in random passwords - how did you complie on HP?

Rgds...Geoff

Re: script to generate a password

Dave La Mar — Fri, 09 May 2003 19:35:05 GMT

Geoff -
Man, I had forgotten about this note.
Anyway, it was using ANSI C on HP-UX 11.0
Thanks for the follow up.

dl