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

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Norman Alexander said:
I'm led to believe some special characters in either username or password produce unexpected results. E.g. a leading minus sign.
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This particular password is the name of a day of the week with an initial capital, followed by four digits. They probably goofed and put a space between the word and the numbers. Something like that. My point is that there is no technical reason for that particular message to be generated. It has to be user error.

Our high-security environment, as I have mentioned upthread, generates initial passwords using the entire gamut of keyboard characters. We've had people mess up I, l, and | because in the font it presents the password in, those three characters are almost indistinguishable from each other.
 
There is absolutely no password that somebody, somewhere won't **** up.

Me: "Okay, I've reset your password to your first name. You have to log in now and change it to something else."
Jessica: "It's not working."
Me: "It's your first name. 'Jessica'. With a capital J."
Jessica: "Oh, I typed 'Boopsie', that's what my husband calls me." *giggles*
 
3-error limit password.

First time --- type it in.
<error>
Second time -- Oh, I must have typed too fast, type it in again very carefully.
<error>
Third time -- WTF? It must be my previous one.
<error><locked out>
Oh, ffs!
(call support)
 
I would have gone for special characters as well. I had that on one windows server where the keyboard was set to en_us so special chars were bolloxed. But without special chars no. PEBKAC
Computer User Not Technical.
 
arthwollipot said:
You're with me on this, right? When someone types their ID and password to log on to Windows and they get an "incorrect password" message, it's 100% of the time due to user error, yeah? Or something like NumLock being off (or on). Something that's under their control. There isn't a technical issue that can produce this error, is there?
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I know of one case where it was a hardware fault because it was me. This was on personal hardware. I was getting more than usual Windows login errors, and eventually figured out that a faulty keyboard was sending a tab and a backslash when the tab key was pressed. But I will say that, no matter how vehemently a user swears that they are making no errors, at least 999 times out of 1000, it's user error.
 
arthwollipot said:
Our high-security environment, as I have mentioned upthread, generates initial passwords using the entire gamut of keyboard characters. We've had people mess up I, l, and | because in the font it presents the password in, those three characters are almost indistinguishable from each other.
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I recently had a login where the capital I in my full name was replaced with a lowercase L. It was breathtakingly hard to type that in for the few months I had to use it. Muscle memory is a bitch.

As to your user: Are we sure they can spell the days of the week?

Wendsday in particular is quite tough.
 
I think in general a default/generated computer code not using one of either/or 0/O, I/1/l etc should be a reasonable good practice.
 
arthwollipot said:
You're with me on this, right? When someone types their ID and password to log on to Windows and they get an "incorrect password" message, it's 100% of the time due to user error, yeah? Or something like NumLock being off (or on). Something that's under their control. There isn't a technical issue that can produce this error, is there?
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Two special cases to consider:

1. someone has moved a couple of keys on the user's keyboard (n and m are favourites for that trick)

2. windows 10 has a very annoying habit of inserting the local domain name in front of the user ID after the user has hit the go button.

(This one was preventing me from logging to a Canadian supplier's Sharepoint site. Their tech team checked the logs and told me they could see my local user name being prepended with my domain.)

Putting the user ID in like this stopped Win 10 from doing that:

\\\username

i.e username, password was resulting in \localdomain\username, password.

\\\username, password was resulting in username, password.

:D
 
JoeMorgue said:
I think in general a default/generated computer code not using one of either/or 0/O, I/1/l etc should be a reasonable good practice.
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Agreed.

FirstMLast was their preferred username and they were small enough for that to work. The IT person who created my account confused a capital I with a lowercase L and it was too hard to fix since I wasn't going to be using the login for more than a few months.Hard enough to type your own name without spaces, but add in misspelling your own name and it got really tough. I would screw it up at least twice per login.
 
novaphile said:
Two special cases to consider:

1. someone has moved a couple of keys on the user's keyboard (n and m are favourites for that trick)

2. windows 10 has a very annoying habit of inserting the local domain name in front of the user ID after the user has hit the go button.

(This one was preventing me from logging to a Canadian supplier's Sharepoint site. Their tech team checked the logs and told me they could see my local user name being prepended with my domain.)

Putting the user ID in like this stopped Win 10 from doing that:

\\\username

i.e username, password was resulting in \localdomain\username, password.

\\\username, password was resulting in username, password.

:D
Click to expand...

Another problem is when you’re connected to a Remote Desktop that’s in a different language, and consequent different keyboard layout. Typing passwords can be somewhat challenging.
 
Two systems became out of sync nearly 20 years ago. The person in charge of the other system says it was because it wasn't communicated to them. How does she know?

She also asked me to share our code, so I did. The day previously.

Everyone can see you covering your arse
 
zooterkin said:
Another problem is when you’re connected to a Remote Desktop that’s in a different language, and consequent different keyboard layout. Typing passwords can be somewhat challenging.
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Not to that degree but remote desktop sessions deciding to see the client PC's caps lock key whenever they feel like is a reoccurring issue for us.
 
JoeMorgue said:
Not to that degree but remote desktop sessions deciding to see the client PC's caps lock key whenever they feel like is a reoccurring issue for us.
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On the other hand, IT people remoting to my computer and being unable to understand after I told them I mouse left handed that they need to do something different was a recurring problem for me.
 
Trebuchet said:
On the other hand, IT people remoting to my computer and being unable to understand after I told them I mouse left handed that they need to do something different was a recurring problem for me.
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I mouse lefty at the moment because of my injury. I always click the wrong button at first when I'm remoting to someone. Interestingly, the different remote access system we deployed to help people working remotely automatically engages the correct mouse buttons. I wish we could just deploy that to every PC and not use Windows Remote Assistance and Skype any more. It would make life easier.
 
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