Dear Users... (A thread for Sysadmin, Technical Support, and Help Desk people)

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arthwollipot said:
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What is it about people and their passwords? I haven't had to have my password reset more than twice in my 25-year career in IT. About the same rate as I forget my security pass.
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As a support person, I used to have to log in to several remote sites, sometimes only once a year or so. The main campus required password changes every three months, with restrictions against repeating a previous one or even making it too similar to the one you've been using.

So I'd log in to a remote site and have to backtrack through my passwords and hope to hit on the one that was still active there. The first two tries were using my current one, and then the redo when I though I had a typo or something. That gave me one more shot, and invariably it was an older one than that. So yeah, I had to use Password reset a lot. I was in a different support area from the ones that handled those. I actually had the option of "God mode" to do it myself on all our computers, but that was forbidden.
 
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alfaniner said:
As a support person, I used to have to log in to several remote sites, sometimes only once a year or so. The main campus required password changes every three months, with restrictions against repeating a previous one or even making it too similar to the one you've been using.

So I'd log in to a remote site and have to backtrack through my passwords and hope to hit on the one that was still active there. The first two tries were using my current one, and then the redo when I though I had a typo or something. That gave me one more shot, and invariably it was an older one than that. So yeah, I had to use Password reset a lot. I was in a different support area from the ones that handled those. I actually had the option of "God mode" to do it myself on all our computers, but that was forbidden.
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...You know that you can do something about that, right? :D
 
Well that was a surprise. I was just given an award for having the highest QA scores on Tier 2 for the month of September. I got a trophy and a big box of chocolates.

:eye-poppi:cool::eye-poppi
 
alfaniner said:
I actually had the option of "God mode" to do it myself on all our computers, but that was forbidden.
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I used to support a certain application, then when I moved to another team some foolish person tried to revoke my godlike level of access by turning off my own login's privileges there. Then they changed the password on the shared admin login so I couldn't use it to restore my own powers.

They never realized that I had thought ahead and created a completely fake person, just in case. They should have checked for who else had admin privileges and wondered who Amy Feathers was and why she had godlike access to absolutely everything.
 
Gord_in_Toronto said:
:thumbsup:

Trophy = management mind manipulation.

Box of chocolates = nice.
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Heh. On my last team the manager had a particular hatred for me. On one occasion after the whole team had done a lot of extra work and accomplished something big she invited every one except me to a meeting and gave them each a little trophy and cake. This backfired tremendously because my co-workers didn't hate me and found the slight to me reprehensible.

Later on she was demoted. I don't think anyone was sad to see her go.
 
"Oh lordy me I'm a frazzled old elderly woman and there's no one way I can be remembering all these complicated passwords" is a very key part of the forced, intentional "Oh I'm just not a computer person" persona.
 
And I'm back down a rabbit hole of fax troubleshooting.

Why does the medical field use faxes so much? It's 2020. It's a horrible, unsecure, unreliable technology.
 
JoeMorgue said:
And I'm back down a rabbit hole of fax troubleshooting.

Why does the medical field use faxes so much? It's 2020. It's a horrible, unsecure, unreliable technology.
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I once had to provide some medical information to a facility from home before an appointment, and they would only accept a fax. I don't think many people have faxes at home. It was actually the first time I'd had to use that feature on my printer and it took a hell of a lot longer to configure than a secure email or even putting it in an envelope and mailing it.
 
JoeMorgue said:
"Oh lordy me I'm a frazzled old elderly woman and there's no one way I can be remembering all these complicated passwords" is a very key part of the forced, intentional "Oh I'm just not a computer person" persona.
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My mother is such a frazzled old elderly woman with password remembrance issues. So she writes them all down, which makes sense...except she writes them all down in different places at different times. Watching her log into Amazon or something is a real treat, she'll bring out a notepad, several index cards, and some loose sheets of paper covered in various logins and passwords ranging from ten years ago to yesterday and go through trying several. And although I always tell her to write down the entire password exactly as she should enter it, and she does, when she reads it back to herself she omits punctuation marks and ignores capitalization "because that shouldn't matter".
 
TragicMonkey said:
My mother is such a frazzled old elderly woman with password remembrance issues. So she writes them all down, which makes sense...except she writes them all down in different places at different times. Watching her log into Amazon or something is a real treat, she'll bring out a notepad, several index cards, and some loose sheets of paper covered in various logins and passwords ranging from ten years ago to yesterday and go through trying several. And although I always tell her to write down the entire password exactly as she should enter it, and she does, when she reads it back to herself she omits punctuation marks and ignores capitalization "because that shouldn't matter".
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That's why at this point I just don't tell many of my users that capitalization doesn't matter on their username, because there's just too much chance it will just confuse them in regards to their password.

But I will say that the IT Industry sort of passed the point of diminishing returns on traditional typed in passwords a while back and didn't properly address it. Biometric, token based, or other alternatives forms should, maybe not be the norm, but at least be more viable then they currently are.
 
What I love is people who devise a "system" to make passwords they can remember, but make it so obvious that anyone can deduce what their passwords are. A few jobs ago my boss had such a system. We were on the schedule of changing passwords every three months so she based hers off the season: her passwords were always [Prior Season][Current Season][Two Digit Year]. So "FallWinter09" then "WinterSpring10" then "SpringSummer10" and so forth.

We certainly didn't abuse our knowledge of that, of course.
 
Ohhh, ****...

I just went to put the finishing touches on my latest electronic project. The code is not there. I was just working on it last night, and have put weeks into it. I don't know what happened. I think it got deleted when I was trying to do a Cut/Paste to move some code around, then it auto-saved. I had even made a copy to save my work at some point but I can't find that, either.

If I had more than one god damn USB slot I'd have had my Time Machine connected and there wouldn't be a problem. As it is I was using it for the Arduino board most of the time. I had problems with those connectors that provide more USB slots so I wasn't using one.

This means I have to start completely from scratch.

I am quite perturbed.
 
Ouch!


For complex stuff I do regular commits to github. For simpler stuff I regularly save as filename_BSF.whatever for Best So Far. Except when I forget.


eta: On Windows Diskdigger might help if there are recoverable file parts. Too long since I used it and that was on a sd card
 
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JoeMorgue said:
And I'm back down a rabbit hole of fax troubleshooting.

Why does the medical field use faxes so much? It's 2020. It's a horrible, unsecure, unreliable technology.
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The other big fax holdout seems to be Real Estate. When you buy or sell a house you have to learn where all the public fax machines are.
 
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