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Hard restart

One of my long-term projects has been documenting my work, here at work. Today I’ve started working through all the minutia surrounding the administration of the web server. In my notes from the original setup, I was reminded of a troubleshooting sledgehammer at my disposal. I try to connect via HTTP to a particular numerical IP address, and after providing a login name and password, I have access to a web interface which controls the plug on the power supply our server is jacked in to. I can do a “hard” restart by, essentially, simulating a blackout.

One hopes that we never have to do that, and to date, we never have. Which might explain why I have the login name, but have lost the password. My notes say, “admin password,” suggesting I may have used a password I was currently using for another account, but like a good little geek I’ve changed all my passwords in the last year, and forgotten the old ones. I hope I can talk the data center administrators into resetting the password—but then, from a security point of view, maybe I hope I can’t.

Now playing: Comedown from Magician Among The Spirits by The Church

Posted by pjm on September 27, 2004 5:04 PM |

Comments

One could always deploy an encryption algorithm that uses a combination of numbers, etc., and a hash key so that the password is transparent to the user. Or something like that.

I hate to document. No good geek like it.

Posted by: Julia | September 27, 2004 5:21 PM

Geez, pjm, ramping up for grad school?

Posted by: damocles | September 27, 2004 5:51 PM

I think since “Me leaving for grad school” and “Me getting hit by a bus” have roughly the same consequences for my employers, the motivations really only matter to me. But yes, I’ve been spending a lot of free time laying the groundwork for the application season. I told my supervisor today, then hit him up for an LOR.

Julia, the thing about the UPS is that APC set up the authentication mechanism - not me. If it was me, it would be set up with an RSA public key so I could auth with my private key and only need to remember one passphrase for all sites. That’s how all our servers are set up; it cut in half the number of passwords I need to remember. (I still need to remember the root passwords, though, because we don’t allow direct root access - you need to su in. If I was really paranoid I’d do everything with sudo, but I’m not there yet.)

Posted by: pjm | September 27, 2004 7:15 PM

I’d love to sit down and properly document everything here at work, but like Julia said a). we geeks hate to document and b). whenever i sit down to do something like this, my attention is needed elsewhere. One day, I promise I’ll do a brain dump and spill all the dirty little secrets I know.

Posted by: damocles | September 28, 2004 5:17 PM

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