I can't remember my password!

[blammo]

I was just messing with a php script that served up some kind of bugroom intranet, and it gave the option to change my password in the settings to a randomly generated one. It gave me choices like these:

vw2EJCj2upTr
ggAaxmn5pROg
36AFAhvJPEWz

How the hell is anyone supposed to remember that? Imagine if you had a couple semi-colons or umlauts in there! I have a lot of logins in my realm and tend to use and re-use a set of about a 15 passwords, ones that I can remember! Sometimes I'm stuck and have to refer to that little piece of paper deep in my wallet. I'm just curious as to whether people use passwords like these or not, because I don't think I could.

[BrEakbEaTs]

For security, passwords in that format are the best way to go, even better if you incorporate sign/symbols into the passwords.. If you need to, Document the passwords, lock a hard copy away in a Security Safe, then keep a soft copy in an encypted format, say Axcrypt, or PGP, etc (Use a massive passphrase). I dont know if you network has change control or something like that, but in the network I run, we need to take messure before changing things, and not expected to know passwords of the top of our heads.

[Dog-One]

I had passwords like that on a VAX VMS system I used years ago. They were autoassigned every month. The only thing I could do was practice writing them down over and over like I was getting ready for a spelling B. Once I had them down cold, I would take the paper scraps and shred them. You didn't want to take a week off from work, because they used a 3-strikes and your out and it was real hard to remember those buggers if you didn't use them everyday. And when you hosed the 3rd attempt, you had to go through a real fun security audit with the systems folks and your boss--meanwhile the work continued to stack up.

[Bradlis7]

I had passwords like that on a VAX VMS system I used years ago. They were autoassigned every month.

I don't see the point in that. When I was in high school, we had to change our password every 6 weeks on the network, and I hated it. You couldn't use the same password twice until they reset the server over the summer. It's hard to think of a different password every time.

[h4d]

All of my passwords are like that. It's definetely the best way to go, but I use Red Hat's recommendations for creating them.

You can find that here: http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/l...tion-pass.html