[Dovecot] adding users to passwd-file

[Bill Landry]

On Mon, April 26, 2010 1:46 pm, Phil Howard wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 4:38 PM, Heiko Schlittermann
> <hs at schlittermann.de>wrote:
>
>> Some people use „htpasswd“, but there not password scheme is coded into
>> the password hash.
>>
>> It's not clear what you're seeking - some tool for generating the hashed
>> string (e.g. „openssl passwd -1 "$cleartext"“) or some tool for managing
>> the
>> entries in the (dovecot) password file.
>>
>
> I left it vague to handle some variety.  Something to add/delete users is
> nice.  Something to change password in place is nice.  Something that
> given
> a user and plain text password and everything else Dovecot needs when
> using
> it as userdb, and would output to stdout the line contents that would go
> into the file, would do the job.
>
> I want to avoid re-inventing the wheel.  If there are no wheels, I guess
> I'll just look up the salted-MD5 format details and do it.


Here's a little perl script you can start with for creating the MD5 salted
password (slightly modified from something I found on the net a couple of
years ago):
=====
#!/usr/bin/perl -wl
use strict;

use Crypt::PasswdMD5 qw(unix_md5_crypt);
my @salt = ( '.', '/', 0 .. 9, 'A' .. 'Z', 'a' .. 'z' );

# take clear-text password as argument:
my $password = shift || die "usage: $0 password";

my %encrypted;

# generate md5 password
$encrypted{md5} = unix_md5_crypt( $password, gensalt(8) );

print "$_ $encrypted{$_}" for sort keys %encrypted;

# uses global @salt to construct salt string of requested length
sub gensalt {
my $count = shift;

my $salt;
for (1..$count) {
$salt .= (@salt)[rand @salt];
}

return $salt;
}
=====

You will need to have the Crypt::PasswdMD5 perl module installed to use this.

Bill