Secure, sharable records of FTP/SSH accounts

As is the case with any web design agency, our company maintains开发者_C百科 a list of FTP and SSH accounts for our client sites.

In my opinion, the two most important issues for such a list is that it is easily sharable, while keeping its contents a secure as possible.

With this is mind, I'm curious as to how people are solving this in other companies. My own suggestions involve setting up an online database (in which case SSL should be used to keep it secure) or use something like 1Password (which would make the sharing process slightly more complicated.

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Erik, there's no good reason to allow your fellows to use FTP anymore, the right solution here is to use SSH keys, individual user accounts (SSH), and group/folder permissions. If you're interested in this comment back, and I'll gladly flesh out my answer.

When each user has a dedicated server account (UNIX was invented to work this way) you can add users to groups that represent their roles in the company. If you staff should be able to make image adjustments, but not code for example, on clients XYZ, you can manage those users and groups with a tool that keeps the user and group settings in sync on the servers (there are many.)

In the case that you really have to use FTP, kick your sysadmin out, there's no good reason in 2011 not to be using SFTP (which is essentially SCP, which is the Secure Copy protocol, based on SSH)… which because it's SSH based, will use the user's UNIX user account (SSH)… see the group/etc permissions from above, and you have a covered solution.

Regarding passwords, there's really no viable software for sharing group passwords, I guess because group passwords are forbidden in many industries (e-commerce, PCI) as a sign of insecurity and a failure to be able to trace user activity. However something like Keepass (see Google for your platform-specific implementation) on Dropbox can work really well.

Source: maintainer of the defacto-standard web software deployment tool Capistrano & 5 year server admin veteran.