script to generate a password

[Doug_3]

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

[Pete Randall · Accepted solution]

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

[Darren Prior]

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.

[Doug_3]

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

[Geoff Wild]

Here's a good one in C.

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

Rgds...Geoff

[John Poff]

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. ;)

[Dave La Mar]

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

[Geoff Wild]

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

[Dave La Mar]

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