Hero To The People or: The Case of the Confidential Password
Here's a short tale on how my school's administration manager declared me a Hero To The People.
A little bit of background: My school has three distinct networks - a semi-public one (which all teachers and pupils can connect to and which is obviously ranked lowest in the router's list of priorities), a private one for all the school's PCs and a seriously locked down one for the administrative and privileged stuff. The latter one also isn't supervised by our school's own IT staff but by a dedicated company (The Company from hereon) which solely does this kind of work for our state.
They're also a bit weird. You'll see.
That much for the background. On to the story!
So, our administrator (let's call him Felix) has this really powerful laser printer. Coloured prints, duplex, \*really\* fast, stapler, everything you might need to print lots of documents (be that certificates or disciplinary records). Costs a considerable four-figure sum.
He recently had to replace the fuser - that one was easily done: Open the lid, pop out the old one, push new one in, close lid and reset the fuser counter.
It was the last step where he hit a small snag: The menu in which to reset the counter was password protected. The Company in its undecipherable wisdom had decided that because the printer was connected to the administrative network that all its features needed to be locked down. Hence the password. I'm not precisely sure what havoc the maintenance menu could wreak on the network but hey! And yes, maintenance menu. This printer also had a *separate* configuration menu (protected by a different password).
Off to the support hotline he went to answer the riddles three - promptly to be thrown into the abyss.
Felix: "So you see, I kind of need this password?" Support: "You cannot handle the ~~truth~~ password!"
For some reason this then resulted in a three months standoff after which The Company could finally be persuaded to dispatch a technician.
Come the day of His Arrival: Felix: "Good morning! You can help me with this password issue?" Technician: "You cannot handle the ~~truth~~ password!" Felix: "Yeah, I kind of figured that out by now. That's why **you** are here, after all, right?" Technician: "I ~~can't handle the truth~~ am not allowed to know the password either!" Felix: *\*twitch\**
Yeah, the rest of the meeting went equally well. The proposed solution was thus: Buy a new printer (remember the four-figure cost? That would come out of *our* budget!) and **scrap** the old one (because it had been contaminated by secrets!)
Needless to say, Felix didn't think much of that "solution" and that's when he approached me. The rest of the story is somewhat anticlimactic:
I had a look at the printer and it definitely had a bit more computing power in there than your usual $30 printer from Walmart. In a flash of inspiration I also remembered that most devices have some hardware capability of resetting stuff to factory settings. A quick Google search yielded a video on YouTube how to do just that for this exact model of printer (you can find tutorial videos for the most insanely off-track devices on there. Now, if those guys could just reduce their waffling from ten minutes down to the actual 30 seconds of relevant stuff...). One minute with a screw driver and a change of position for a jumper and presto!
No more password. And yes, the default configuration works just fine, too.
It was then that I received my title of Hero To The People.
For about one day, after which had to talk to my principal who for some weird reason is not that keen on new and exciting blotches of colour on the ceiling (I'm also a chemistry teacher).