Password Problem Revisited

[Bob Stockler]

On Fri, Jun 11, 2004 at 12:38:12PM -0400, Vicky Prigg wrote:
| 
| Despite some good suggestions, we have not solved our password problem.
| It is not a site password as some have suggested, rather it is a
| 'processing password' that has somehow been acquired by some (not all)
| of our processing tables.  It was not a one time thing that happened to
| all the processing tables present at the time.  It happened to a few,
| while not affecting others.  And, it is not a case where someone gave a
| password to a processing table and forgot it.   We cannot use backup
| tapes because they have long since been recycled.  We do have an fppath
| file in the directory /etc/default and it is set to /appl .  Is there a
| way to convert processing that was not saved as ASCII to an ASCII
| format?  Some of the processing tables were saved as ASCII and those I
| can use vi to remove the password.  Others were not saved as ASCII.  We
| have since set ABE = ascii so any future programs should not be a
| problem.  I know that fptech can do this for us, but we have quite a
| number of programs that would require fixing and it would be quite
| costly.  Also, if anyone has any ideas as to how this happened in the
| first place, please let me know!  

As far as I know, a "processing table password" is set _only_
by having a "site password" when the table is saved by either
of the dcabe or rcabe processing table editors.

The file "/etc/default/fppath" should consist of three lines,
the first of which holds the default value for PFPROG, the
second holds the default value for PFDATA, and the third holds
the default value for PFDIR.  If there is a fourth line and it
contains _any_ characters (even whitespace characters) it will
result in a password being assigned to any tables saved with
the cabe editors.

If you still have any of the passworded tables saved in ASCII,
look at the first line of them using vi and see if they've all
got the same characters between the last two (of five) colons
on the line.  If so, you're possibly in luck . . . the encoded
tables were probably saved using that same site password.

Edit "/etc/default/fppath" to add a fourth line containing only
those characters between the last two colons on those first lines,
and exactly those characters.

Now, with ABE=ASCII, use one of the cabe editors to edit one of
the passworded tables that's been saved encoded and I'll bet it
will let you in, so you can save it in ASCII.

That failing, get a price from fPtech before giving up on them.

Last resort, get DOCGEN from Jean-Pierre Radley (jpr at jpr.com).
It can document encoded, passworded tables.  With it you can
document the tables in question to text files, then can use my
"mktable.pl" program (available in the filePro directory at
ftp.jpr.com) to translate the documentation into process tables.
tables.

Bob

-- 
Bob Stockler - bob at trebor.iglou.com
Author: MENU EDIT II - The BEST Creator/Editor/Manager for filePro User Menus.
Fully functional (time-limited) demos available by email request (specify OS).