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I want to be able to store the login details all of my remote FTP accounts in one place, securely. Then I'd like clients like autofs/curlftpfs, Filezilla, etc to use this one store of passwords. I'm not interested in GUI-dependent solutions. Is this possible somehow?

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1 Answer

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Ideally those would be SFTP accounts, using SSH public key authentication rather than passwords. You'd gain both security and convenience. But let's assume you don't have a choice of not using FTP with passwords.

You could store the passwords (the .netrc file) on an encrypted filesystem and mount that filesystem only when you want to access it. A simple way to create an encrypted directory tree is encfs. Setup:

# install encfs, e.g. apt-get install encfs
mkdir ~/.passwords.d
encfs ~/.passwords.encfs ~/.passwords.d
mv ~/.netrc ~/.passwords.d
ln -s .passwords.d/.netrc ~
fusermount -u ~/.passwords.d

Daily use:

encfs ~/.passwords.encfs ~/.passwords.d
ftp …
fusermount -u ~/.passwords.d
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Wow, that's great! In you opinion, would that encrypted directory be safe to upload to a remote backup location? – mattalexx May 16 '11 at 18:56
I connect to most things via SFTP/SCP, but some clients' production servers are FTP only. – mattalexx May 16 '11 at 18:57
1  
@mattalexx: Yes, you can back up the encrypted directory. Of course, make sure your password is strong enough to withstand brute force attacks. – Gilles May 16 '11 at 19:07
FTP is insecure, all traffic is plain text, no encription (not even passwords!). – vonbrand Jan 26 at 3:04

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