Today's round of file format bingo: password management

So I got struck by one of my frequent itch-scratching urges...

I keep my passwords in Revelation, a GNOME password manager. It's been mostly unmaintained for years, but hey, it does what I want and works well. Occasionally I'm out somewhere and want to log in to something or other, but can't because I don't have my passwords with me. Curses. Every time this happens I think 'man, I should just stick them on my phone', so today for some reason I decided to finally get around to it.

The tricky bit is that my phone runs Windows Mobile. So I had a fun round of file format bingo to hit on a method to get the passwords out of Revelation and into an app on Windows Mobile, all without needing to pay for anything (and, ideally, using open source software).

In the end, I hit on this: export from Revelation in Password Safe 2.x format. Import in Password Safe 3 on a Windows machine (or via wine if you don't have one handy). Export to Password Safe XML format. Import to KeePass on the Windows machine / wine (1.x or 2.x, doesn't matter). Export as KeePass 1.x format. Install KeePassPPC on the phone and transfer the database file you got from KeePass to the phone. Run KeePassPPC, open the file! Success at last. Whew.

There may be an alternative route to this which cuts out the Password Safe step and is all Linux-native: export from Revelation in XML format, use this script to translate the XML file into a format KeePassX can use, open it in KeePassX, and save to a file to load in KeePassPPC. But now I've got it done I can't be bothered confirming that works :)

Well, hope this helps anyone else who happens to be in the same (or similar) situation. It's worth noting there's what looks like a very well-designed Windows Mobile manager here with a really good touch-friendly interface. I'd love to be able to use that, but it seems fairly basic at present and doesn't appear to have any import capabilities, which makes it something of a non-starter, unfortunately. I'm not re-entering a few hundred passwords!


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