Going Overboard on Open Source

ZDNet ^ | 26 August 2002 | John Carroll

[discostu]

A lot of stuff you have to read knowing the history of the participants. I try to be reasonable, but you can't always. When you see people insisting that Windows is the only OS that crashes you know you're not going to have a reasonable discussion with these people. And then some folks just piss me off. There's still plenty of good stuff in the discussions, just gotta skip the noise.

[jammer]

I didn't answer your question. I have no idea how the passwords got hosed. I don't THINK it was the HDDs, but that was my first thought. I was and am perplexed, because I haven't seen or heard anything like it. One machine WAS a laptop, which, let's face it, probably isn't really a computer, but a bunch of miniaturized parts masquerading as one. I'll probably get flamed for that, but, oh well. But the machines tested okay after an FDisk and reload and haven't burped since. So, to answer your question: I don't know.

[discostu]

How bizaare. You didn't change the machine name did you? I completely thrashed an NT4 machine doing that once, luckily it was a test machine. If you installed any additional security software that might have caused problems too. Sometimes the bits just get scrambled, even in more stable OSes.

[jammer]

You know, I believe I did change the name! Thanks for the tip. This highlights another problem: user error (or lack of OS error trapping) causing the OS to be blamed.

[discostu]

Well technically you should be able to change the name. And I have done it successfully. It's definitely an OS problem that sometimes a change to the computer name goes psycho. I think it has to do with how some of the server functions access the server (MS is really fond of always accessing the machine through UNCs even if it's local, that's a really lazy way to not have to write two sets of code for local and remote administration, it also has some bad side effects though).