(no subject)

[random-c.livejournal.com]

I haven't done phone support in a while.
Had a developer phone up, asking for the main user password for an XPe system I'd built a while ago. I know what this password should be. We went through typing it in. No go. No caps lock, no character misunderstandings. Tried the admin user - straight in, and that's a far nastier password. There's a problem with the admin user however: someone's set the shell to nothing. Standard practice for the user setup but not for admin. OK. Up comes task manager, regedit, fix it. Reboot. Yay, we have a start bar. Maybe I didn't set the user password to not expire... nope, that's set. Aha! It's automatically logging on as the user, so the password will be in the registry in plain text.... and here we find the problem. Whoever had the box before this guy, and did this final setup not only borked the Administrator user setup, but they'd changed the box's password to Password, and updated the registry to match. And then didn't tell the dev they'd given it to. Nice. I wish I knew who to kill for this.

Comments

[dmsalem00.livejournal.com]

do so indiscriminately, and eventually you'll get the right one.

[random-c.livejournal.com]

Apparently it's a case of $boss telling someone else to do it but that person not telling me and $boss not realising that as 'owner' of this little precious I'm supposed to know everything that happens to it.

[jacobine.livejournal.com]

I really hate that...

I had one once where a user had left, and thus we no longer had the old network password. Usually, this wouldn't be too much of a problem, because the techs can log in. Except the PC Tech group had been left out of the admin group on the box. And someone had changed the admin password (it wasn't our standard, password, administrator /or/ just blank.) So I could log in on the network and do nothing else to the machine.

Since the user was gone, I reimaged the damn thing.

[random-c.livejournal.com]

Thing is, these are boxes I'm building, with a custom version of the OS, which is *supposed* to be strictly controlled.