AND I forgot the answer to the ‘security question’.
Yes, I am embarrassed. :o
This is just to say I have another email address in my profile. [I have informed TubaDiva]
I’m sorry.
Damn, there are soooooo many places we need passwords for these days. We can either be insecure and use the same one everywhere, or risk forgetting, and use different ones everywhere.
I have to remember about 15 completely different passwords at work.
I used to be a part time administrator for a small web-based companies servers. It got insane. I kept a little pocket book with me with all of the esoteric passwords to the root users, encryption keys, credit card databases, blah blah blah. Only problem there is that if that book ever fell into enemy hands…well, I’d be hosed, anyway.
“Uh…yeah, listen, about changing the database configuration…”
Maybe you can contact your mail host, and they can e-mail it to you?
d&r
Only 15? Lucky you.
I’ve got close to 60, hence the name.
Do yours change without your prior knowledge?
I know the feeling. I use a program called passwordsafe to keep track of them all. It is standalone, so it can be run on any windows box without an install, and uses blowfish to encrypt the passwords. I keep it on a thumb drive and have it with me always. The database is small enough I also periodically email it to my gmail account as a backup.
Now if I forget that password, I am so screwed.
I use Norton Password Manager on my home PC. Anytime an application prompts me for a password, Norton fills it in for me. It’s great. But I still keep a list of passwords just in case. At work, I restrict myself to a rotating sequence of passwords (OK, there’s only two in the sequence!). So if I forget, I can guess the right one pretty quickly.
Change? No. Expire? Frequently. Most of mine have 60-day lifespans. One or two have 90-day lives. Some are only 30 days. The high-level stuff has 15-day lifespans, and the really high-level-breach-this-and-the-bank’s-out-of-business stuff has a two minute life.
At least the three voicemail systems I use at work have non-expiring passwords.
I somehow manage to remember all my email passwords. It’s all the other ones that I forget. I always end up signing back up for things like BellSouth online, Duke Power and my mortgage company. At one point, I had 5 different accounts with BellSouth, all with different log-in names.
And the one time I got the bright idea to write all of my passwords down, I lost the paper they were written on. :rolleyes:
Save yourself a lotagrief. A few months into the new year the office supply stores will be selling the coat pocket size Daily Planners cheap!
Alphabetical dividers and all. Get a pack of extra sheets too.
Makes a handy-dandy log book for user names and passwords for ready accessability.
Thanks for the tips, all.
Johnny L.A., My host aksed me to answer the ‘security question’. Which I forgot as well. I told you, I’m a :wally
PinGear, Sounds like a good plan. Thanks. 
Just be sure to write small.
I wish I could say I was kidding, but I actually came across the advice “If you have to write down your IDs and passwords, write small” in a CISSP “practice questions” book. :rolleyes:
The rationale for this was small writing is harder for someone to “shoulder surf” or otherwise get a look at it.
That, or learn a different alphabet to write passwords in, which works great for me, as long as I don’t forget where those 1.5 inch post its went…