Musings of a *IX guy

Clipperz password manager

There are various password managers around. I wanted one that was web based so I could access it from anywhere , I also wanted to install it on my own web server. I would never use it for anything financial , just for the numerous web sites that require a user name and password.

After searching around I found Clipperz .  This seemed to do everything I wanted and the community edition is  licensed with  an open source  AGPL license . If you don’t want to install it on your own web server then Clipperz offers a hosted service for users. The Clipperz site explains how the data is encrypted and why it is secure.

Clipperz has some very nice features :

• You can copy the password into the clipboard without it showing in clear text.
• You can create a read only copy on your local desktop in a single HTML file than can be read with a browser , keeping the same encryption method – very cool!
• You can import passwords from CSV, Excel , KeePass, Password Plus.
• You can export the passwords and import them into another Clipperz account.
• It can be run it a Firefox Sidebar or Opera panel

Installation on Centos 5

This assumes you already have Apache, PHP and Mysql already installed and working.

For my Centos server I needed to install json and the bcmath PHP extensions.

Installing PHP json on Centos 5

I had to do the following :-

yum install php-devel

yum install php-pear        ( this will also install pecl )

pear install pecl/json            ( if you try to just use pecl to install json you will get an error about a 8MB limit the solution is to use pear – I found this thanks to this page )

vi /etc/php.d/json.ini and add a line :-

extension=json.so

Install bcmath

yum install php-bcmath

If you don’t install bcmath you will get the following in the Apache error log when you try to register a user :-

PHP Fatal error:  Call to undefined function bcscale() in /var/www/html/mytools/clipperz/php/index.php on line 72

Restart Apache

service httpd restart

Creating the database for Clipperz

mysql -u root -p

You will be prompted for the Mysql root password you first set when you setup Mysql

create database clipperz ;

create all privileges on clipperz.* to “clipperzadmin”@”localhost” identified by “passwd” ;

flush privileges ;

exit ;

passwd is the password you want for the clipperzadmin DB user

Installing the PHP files

Download the community edition of Clipperz from sourceforge

Goto the HTML directory of your Apache installation – /var/www/html on Centos and if ncessary create a subdirectory where you want to install Clipperz. You probably want this directory protected by Apache authorisation. Unzip the Clipperz zip file you downloaded and rename the directory extracted to something like clipperz. Goto the directory and look at the INSTALL.txt file.

vi php/configuration.php

Set the database name , database user and database password you set when creating the database.

Point you browser to the location of Clipperz /php/setup/index.php

e.g. If you installed Clipperz in /var/www/html/mytools/clipperz you would go to yourdomain/mytools/cliperz/php/setup/index.php

You will now be in a page with POG  ( PHP Object Generator ). Hit the POG ME UP button and if all goes well you will have a proceed button. Hit that and you will go onto another page where you can examine the database. On the plugins tab make sure you do not install base64 if you do Clipperz will not work on Centos – if the tab says it is installed then click on uninstall.

You are now ready to use Clipperz. Point your browser at the Clipperz location yourdomain/mytools/cliperz if you used the setting above. Click on the Create One button to create an account.

There are links on the pages for help and the main Clipperz site is very helpful.

You may want to donate some money to the project – there are links on the Clipperz site.

Once installed it is recommended you remove the php/setup directory to prevent someone deleting database records .

You can backup your settings by exporting the data to json format  ( Data – Export – Export to json format ), this will keep all your settings and can be restored into another Clipperz account.

Another useful thing is to create an offline copy – this will create a single HTML file that can be loaded in a browser , keeping the same encryption protection.