How do you manage your passwords?

Solution 1:

KeePass is great.

Solution 2:

I have a very simple way of dealing with passwords:

I don't like password managers, but I like crypto, so I take advantage of one-way hashes (md5, sha1, etc) and generate passwords using them.

How it works?

First, I choose a good long password that I will use everywhere. For example qwerty (don’t use that, just an example). Now for every site, your password will be the md5 (or sha1) of qwerty + site name. For example:

$ echo “qwerty http://www.facebook.com” | md5
9d7d9b30592fd43dd6629ef5c12c6e9a

$ echo “qwerty http://www.twitter.com” | md5
cdf0e74e19836efb20f29120884b988d

That way my password for facebook is 9d7d9b30592fd43dd6629ef5c12c6e9a and for twitter is: cdf0e74e19836efb20f29120884b988d

Both long and secure. If someone steals my twitter password he has no way to reverse back to figure out the other passwords. Plus, doing that you don’t need any password software stored (just the md5/sha1 binaries which come by default on Linux and are easy to find on Windows).

Solution 3:

Password Safe has solid encryption and a random password generator. Groups of passwords are then distributed as encrypted files based on who needs which passwords.

Solution 4:

We keep our passwords printed out, in a binder with our other network documentation, and in our physically secure server room that only a few people have access to.

I don't know what 'real sys admins' think of this but I think this is a good solution for us. I am interested in the other answers to this question.

Solution 5:

We have a PGP encrypted text file. It is encrypted to each of the sysadmin's keys. We use a vim plugin to make it easy to update.

At a previous job we used a similar scheme, but used symmetrical encryption because we hadn't discovered the plugin (or it didn't exist yet) and no one had spent the time to work out how private keys would work.