As part of my plan to rescue data from old CVS repositories, PWCrypt is now available at Bitbucket. PWCrypt provides command line access to the Unix crypt library function.
This program and an accompanying article were written in response to a problem I had in 1999 with Netscape Enterprise Server. After taking over administration of a Windows NT-based Netscape server, I discovered I did not know the administrator password for NES. I hunted down the password file and saw it hashed passwords using the same format at the password file for Unix-like systems.
So I needed a hashed value for a known password to drop into NES’s password database and used this program to create that value. It’s seen no substantive changes since the original publication eleven years ago.
Nota bene: This is a Mercurial repository stored on Bitbucket, not Git/GitHub like I’ve made available the past few weeks. I chose Mercurial for this project so I could get a better feeling for it vis-à-vis Git.