Curious Case #3: The Password Problem

With all the free work we had been doing to pay back our competitors it was time to actually make some money and I made sure to find work at my job for Charlie to come in at least once a week but in between I had asked Daryl the dispatcher to keep any eye out for any guaranteed money opportunities and that was how we ended up at the home of the CEO of a local Sports Shoe magnate who kept having problems logging into certain systems.

It took two days leading up to the visit working out the details with his Executive Assistant a fascinating lady named Sparkle Silverfox. I couldn't help asking how her parents came up with that name and she laughed explaining how they had named her Elizabeth Hamilton but she had changed it on her own back in the '70s. I should have known she was the old hippie and not her parents but she didn't look that old. We could tell she was the perfect fit for the equally eccentric CEO.

On the appointed Tuesday we were told the meeting would begin between at 1 PM but we already knew enough to expect a delay and spent the time waiting at a nearby Sandwich shop which was the only thing close to his secluded mansion hidden way up in the hills . While we waited I did battle with my favorite foot long meatball, while Charlie had to agonize over the entire menu before finally compromising with himself by ordering 6" each of Turkey and Tuna.

When we finally stood next to the CEO and watched him login for the first time we were surprised at how long it took to login. Charlie jumped right in saying "Whoa, what're you doing writing a book? No one should have a password that long, it's just too much typing. " The Chief Executive was indignant at first explaining how he had important data to protect and needed the strongest possible security.

I was starting to get uncomfortable but Charlie found a way of turning the tension into a learnable moment for all of us by explaining with complete sincerity that when it comes to passwords the strength is not in the length, but in the special characters and avoiding dictionary words. No one ever thought to question the big boss on how long his password should be but Charlie gave him the training he needed. We went on in detail how Passwords are used in different "namespaces" for example; LDAP for Windows, NIS for unix and sometimes a home grown web page will use a local list of people and passwords . That was the problem in this case when the program could not process that long password.

The discussion included a viewing of his own Company intranet web page for proper password management where it says the password must be exactly 8 characters. The Chief Exec was determined to change that policy so we knew we had to convince him once and for all that it wouldn’t matter anyway. We had him telnet to a terminal and forced him to type only the first 8 characters of his super long password and sure enough it let him login thereby proving that all those extra password characters were a waste of time.

The solution was simple, change the password one more time following the rules and things worked as expected and we went on our way. You can imagine my angry response later on when Daryl said the CEO refused to pay the bill since we didn't actually fix anything. Charlie didn't seem to mind and acted like it was no big deal while I took it as a personal insult until I found out later Charlie had a date with Sparkle Silverfox and that’s why he felt properly compensated.

The Dog Ate My Resume

We had a Geometry teacher in High School who was well liked for telling great stories and giving easy grades but if a student asked a hard question his famous response was "I missed that day at school." After a while we got to thinking he must have been very sickly or delinquent for all the days he missed but we never thought to question his teaching skills, he just didn't know the answer. His main job was Basketball Coach but he had to teach other classes to make his pay and Geometry was on his schedule even if it wasn't his strong suit. At least he was honest.

Back in the first grade I did get sick and miss a day of school and when I got back the next day the teacher took time out to help me catch up with the previous day's work which consisted of one word: pie. Seriously that was a day’s work for a first grader in my day. That was the last time they ever helped me catch up on stuff that was missed. You didn't have to miss a whole day to miss the lesson, it could be anything from daydreaming to dyslexia, the results are the same.

Then later on in life I caught myself using that same lame excuse and I realized that using the ‘missed day at school’ routine was more trouble than good, so then I had to take time out of my adult life to unlearn that teacher's bad habit. That was when I first started looking for other bad things I might have accidentally learned along the way but how do you know it's wrong before it has been revealed? Everything still looks OK so there is no easy way to know which is the wrong idea.

I may not be sure how much bad stuff I did learn but once I got to looking I found all kinds of stuff that I didn't learn. Simple things that would seem obvious to anyone like, How to think. I never had that class, no how to guide, no FAQ , nothing. There should be memory tricks to make things easier to remember, and exercises to remember better. How to smell, how to listen, how to look and see, these were all taken for granted but I can tell I am still not using those skills to the full potential. The brain is such a powerful tool but there is no user manual. It feels like I’m not getting all the features and benefits.

Another variation on the "missed that day at school" is this similar excuse " They didn't teach that at my school". This puts the blame on the teacher, the principal, the school board or even the student body, anybody but the student themselves. Using these excuses is like carrying on the old tradition of the dog ate my homework, then he ate my resume and now the dog ate my career.

Curious Case #2: The Printing Problem

The hardest part of running the Columbia Interlocking Services company was figuring out how to get paid when we were acting as sub-contractors for one of our own competitors. We had tried everything from cash under the table to IOU's but after a few broken promises that led to bad feelings we ended up using our friend Daryl the Dispatcher to keep track of hours and jobs.

That's how we got the call from Daryl saying there was an easy chance to make up for some of the hours we owed to Northwest . It wasn't always us saving them and we recently needed their help on a big job not to mention always borrowing their van for the big stuff like that Cisco 9300 switch that wouldn't fit either one of our cars.

Northwest was the original contractor who then called in the guys from Solution Integrators who together spent the first 4 days gathering data and by the end of the week they were calling us in desperation, specifically Charlie. Luckily we were already done working for the day and promised to come over after lunch. Charlie wanted to go back to the All You can eat buffet to fill his plate with crawdads but we had been there twice in a row already and I insisted on the Burnt Bun burger joint where you can build your own creation, my favorite is guacamole bacon burger with no cheese.

We arrive at the customer site, a service company called Timberlodge, along with a rush of workers returning from lunch as we were escorted through the security system to a conference room where all us consultants were gathered to finally get to the bottom of the issue. I was hoping to break the ice with their main guy who had a big tag on his shirt that said he is the Computer Manager whose name is MAURICE so I gave him my best hand shake along with a "Glad to meet you 'Moreece'," but right away he says "That's how they say it in France but where I comes from it's 'Morris". I made sure to correct myself out loud and made a silent promise to call everyone Buddy.

In the meeting room are all the documents collected showing the logs and reboot times. There are 150 users on these 20 servers providing remote services for every department across the entire campus. The reboots were random and hit all the servers at various different times with only one recurring pattern every day between 2:10 and 2:20pm. The logs were not much help but so far all of the Analysts were blaming the servers but not Charlie. Right away he was more interested in the users.

There were two groups preparing for the coming reboot at 2:15pm. Half the team headed for the server room to see if they can notice some coincidence with the AC or power while the rest will stay in the Crisis Room watching the server consoles to see if the verbose logging they setup might isolate the issue.

Those were good ideas but not for Charlie, he went straight out to the user cube farm and started talking with the area Leaders. He found that half the users come back from lunch at 1Pm and the others at 2pm. Following a hunch he went to the printing station located at the center of the area where the 2pm lunch crowd would have just returned. I asked him what he was up to and he said, "If the answer was in the server room they would have found it by now."

Then at the appointed time Charlie raised his finger in triumph pointing at the sound of a distant user shouting out in frustration; "Crap, every time I print, I loose my server session." Following the sound we found the user coming towards us and the printers. We introduced ourselves to Sharon who had long suffered this problem and even filed a ticket once but had since learned to live with it.

Sharon always knew it was weird that she had to start a new server session so often but since the print jobs did go through successfully no one ever made the connection between printing and server crashing until Charlie heard her print. It turns out she has an old Unix workstation that uses a malformed print command that caused a panic in the process on the other end.

We never did fix the issue, we just got her to print from another machine. The guys from Northwest were so pleased they offered to take us out for beers so we had to go and listen how they had done all the real work. I kept trying to get Charlie the credit he deserved but every time he told the story the most important part was "How that girl cussed!"