Some days..

When you're starting a new company, some days are better than others.

A major wireless broadband company in Del Mar is currently evaluating LiveProject. Their main manager has forgot her password, and tried to reset it, but she failed every time. So, I took a look, and sure enough, I quickly discovered we had a bug in the 'reset password' functionality. So, trying to help her, I call my IT support person,"John," to have him manually reset the password. At the time, I did not have access to our Administrator tool as I was OoO.

John looks at the Administrator, and realizes we have forgot to add that functionality. It simply never came up, since users can reset their passwords themselves (when it worked). Since the users passwords are encrypted in our database, there is no easy way to quickly reset the password, except to store a known, encrypted one in the users record.

John resets his password, and enters MySQL to perform the necessary update. Meanwhile, I'm trying to log in. As I try, my login fails. I try again, same result. A sense of despair fills me up, as I slowly type the password I know John was using to reset the users account. Sure enough, that works. I call John, and say "You know, my password was reset, did you just change all the users password?" There is a dead silence in the other end of the line, I can almost hear John's thought process. "Yes" is all he can get out, and that is with a deep, dark voice full of depair and disbelief.

It was just one of those days, and never again will the Database be updated free-hand, without rollback enabled.