Password Overflow? Check Out KeePass
I don’t know about you, but I have a lot of passwords. All counted, I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if I have over 100 username/password combinations. Email, SSH, online banking….the list could go on. There is no way that I’m going to remember all of those.
How do you deal with so many passwords? You could conceivably try to make them all the same, or variants of each other. Then you run into sites with certain restrictions, like “at least 1 upper case letter and 1 number” and that throws the whole system off.
I suppose you could also write them all down somewhere, but that pretty much defeats the purpose if someone finds that piece of paper locked up in your safe deposit box (errr, I mean the PostIt note under your keyboard, right? Right?) There has to be a better way.
The solution that I’ve used for the last 2+ years has been to use a password management program, such as KeePass. KeePass is open-source and completely free. It keeps an encrypted database of all usernames, passwords, URLs, notes, etc in an easy-to-use and nicely-organized program. All you have to do is remember one (1) Master Password to unlock the entire database. The program is small and can even be used from a USB stick (KeePass Portable).
The trick is to make that Master Password long enough to be secure, yet easy to remember (and type). Careful, though — if you forget the Master Password, there’s really no way to recover your password database.
KeePass is a wonderful program, and has been extremely reliable. I’ve never had a single problem with it. I just noticed today that they have been nominated for the Sourceforge.net 2008 Community Choice Awards. If you’d like to nominate them for an award, by all means, go for it! I did — and nominated them for “Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins”, though it was a tough choice between that an “Best Project”.
In typical Amazon rating lingo, “Keepass: A++ Works as described. Would use again.”
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