I have a need for doing password strength testing. I had reviewed a few options, such as google's password strength checking service, which involves requesting https://www.google.com/accounts/RatePassword?Passwd= but that returns "4" (strong) for passwords like "PaSsWoRd", and "3" (fairly strong) for "Secret"... I really wanted cracklib, but the CentOS system I was on doesn't have python-cracklib and the package for it is included in the base cracklib package.

So I decided to try using ctypes to wrap cracklib. It worked out great, though it does require Python 2.6 (which is available on the system as "python26"). So I've released the python-ctypescracklib package on github. I plan on putting this and the psycopg wrapper I wrote about recently in pypi when I have a few moments.

ctypes is very good stuff!

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