Linux Revisited
What do I need from a Computer these days?
Choices Choices Choices
Out of the Box
Securing your Laptop
Progress so far…
Dos Games
Photography and Storage in a Mobile World
Photographic Workflow
I love 1Password. It works. I have over 2400 entries in its database. It keeps all my passwords and software registrations. It is integrated into my browser. So now I have to find something that can take over from it that will not be too disruptive of the way I work.What do I need from a Computer these days?
Choices Choices Choices
Out of the Box
Securing your Laptop
Progress so far…
Dos Games
Photography and Storage in a Mobile World
Photographic Workflow
There are quite a few “wallet” type programs out there, but the two that seem to be above the rest are KeePass and KeePassX. KeePass is a windows program that runs on Linux with mono installed, while KeePassX is a qt application. KeePass has a newer, more capable database, while KeePassX is catching up with an alpha release of version 2 databse back-end. KeePass has many add-ons, including “importers” of many other password managers exported contents (plus ascii, csv et al). KeePassX does not, but it will handle an xml file in a certain format.
1Password exports in a tab de-limited file format with fields of your choice included in the export. There are about 20 fields in a 1Password database, many of which do not have corresponding fields in either of the Linux programs, but I will get to that in a minute.
I chose KeePassX, cause I have no use for mono just now, and downloading 160Meg for a “wallet” app didn’t sit well with my leaning towards simplicity.
I installed KeePassX via Gslapt, then I started it up and added a dummy entry to the database. Then I exported that dummy entry - that gave me all the field names and the format for each individual entry in an .xml document.
Next, I exported the contents of my 1Password database in tab delimited format. Be careful with this file as it is in plain text and all passwords and any other “secret” stuff are readable by anyone who can open the file.
The 1Password file was huge, and I couldn’t see any way to match up all its fields with the KeePassX ones, so I went back into 1Password and exported the fields “title”, “name”, “password”, “URL” and “note” - these corresponded to the main KeePassX fields of “title”, “username”, “url”, “password” and “comment”. I didn’t worry about things like “expiry-date” or “pin” as I had nothing in them.
Next, the 1Password file had to become an xml doc in the format defined by KeePassX. I tried the easy way of downloading some scripts that said they could do the transfer, but none of them worked in my tests.
So I wrote a small shell script (uses sed and awk ) to do what I needed. You can find it here.
It’s very simple, and it works, but watch out for the notes field from the 1Password file - I had to delete 2 notes that were long (500 characters+) and contained a mixture of html and plain text, plus the odd newline here and there. Once I got rid of them, the import ran smoothly.
I now have a “password safe” on my Linux box and it has an auto fill feature that works with most websites, but I will need a lot more use of the program to make an informed decision whether or not to keep it. Early days.
