There’s a small but useful package in Fedora called “pwgen”; it generates random passwords. I’ve used it to generate random passwords for MySQL accounts, for example.
(My reasoning is that those passwords often end up in PHP scripts and such, and so might be viewable by another student. If I allowed students to choose their own passwords, they might reuse a password they are familiar with, one they use for another account. That wouldn’t be secure. Furthermore, if we use a .my.cnf file, there’s no reason anyone should ever have to type a MySQL password, so we might as well make it super-hard to crack.)
However, I’ve had to ssh to Sampras (still running Fedora…) to get these passwords. I couldn’t imagine that pwgen wasn’t available for CentOS/RHEL. Nevertheless:
[root@tempest ~] yum search pwgen Warning: No matches found for: pwgen No Matches found
That can’t be right, I said. Googling for “pwgen centos” found http://pkgs.org/centos-6-rhel-6/epel-i386/pwgen-2.06-5.el6.i686.rpm.html which says it’s available in EPEL. D’oh!
[root@tempest ~] yum repolist all repo id repo name status 10gen 10gen Repository enabled: 6 epel Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 6 - x86_64 disabled epel-debuginfo Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 6 - x86_64 - Debug disabled epel-source Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 6 - x86_64 - Source disabled epel-testing Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 6 - Testing - x86_64 disabled epel-testing-debuginfo Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 6 - Testing - x86_64 - Debug disabled epel-testing-source Extra Packages for Enterprise Linux 6 - Testing - x86_64 - Source disabled rhel-source Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6Server - x86_64 - Source disabled rhel-source-beta Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6Server Beta - x86_64 - Source disabled rhel-x86_64-server-6 Red Hat Enterprise Linux Server (v. 6 for 64-bit x86_64) enabled: 8,896 rhel-x86_64-server-optional-6 RHEL Server Optional (v. 6 64-bit x86_64) enabled: 5,475 rpmforge RHEL 6Server - RPMforge.net - dag disabled rpmforge-extras RHEL 6Server - RPMforge.net - extras disabled rpmforge-testing RHEL 6Server - RPMforge.net - testing disabled repolist: 14,377 [root@tempest ~] yum --enablerepo=epel search pwgen ============================================= N/S Matched: pwgen ============================================== pwgen.x86_64 : Automatic password generation Name and summary matches only, use "search all" for everything. [root@tempest ~] yum --enablerepo=epel -y install pwgen .... Installed: pwgen.x86_64 0:2.06-5.el6 Complete! [root@tempest ~]
