05-II-2019.

The “project” (the page where I was supposed to write stuff about new server) is still unavailable (still was, another month later). Because, ah, security. Will write in confluence's wiki then.

First off, why Cisco AnyConnect – it works only under windowses, doesn’t remember passwords, the certificate is never right (so an extra click each time or stay connected forever, which is a security concern) and by default disconnects the box from the rest of the world, so we practically need two machines – one to connect to the server, other for the rest of it. Now at least some way of connecting the two would be nice – clipboard synchronization, LAN access. I have both, as I’ve already sacrificed a W7 VM for that and the rest of the box is under Linux, but I know for sure that at least some people in the dutch office will have problems with that, starting with Jan.

Now the bloody password. There’s a “self-service” thing but it wants me to register. By issuing so-called security questions. It’s hard to find one where I can enter an answer that I will unambiguously remember in a year or two.

• Mother’s maiden name – won’t accept that, 4 characters is not long enough. What would Hungarians with just Fa for surname do?

• The country I always dreamed of vacationing in – never existed, I didn’t. Specially not by country.

• Name of your favourite cousin? - No such animal, due to family circumstances.

• Favourite colour? - I change that every few years, no good.

• Childhood hero? - I could put one, but next week I wouldn’t be sure whether I spelled it in english or in serbian.

• First name of your eldest nephew/niece? - nobody calls her by official name, and as I haven’t seen her in decades, maybe next time I’d remember someone else as eldest. This is a question for younger folks.

• Parents’ wedding anniversary? I know the date, but in which format would I write it, and in which language? Ambiguous, and impossible to memorize firmly.

• Favourite cartoon character during childhood? None, we didn’t have TV until I was 10, and then with each one of them I went through interest-enjoyment-boredom-disenchantment. Liked Pink Panther, but wasn’t a child at the time.

• Maternal grandmother’s name, elementary school name – the only I can answer unambiguously. At least it didn’t insist on english alphabet only.

But then if I change my password using that service, the rules are:

The minimum password age is 1

The maximum password age is 42

The minimum password length is 7

No. of Passwords Remembered is 24

The password complexity property is Enabled

Wow. So every six weeks I’d have to go through that. No, better leave it at the incomprehensive string from a text file I keep. Wasting ten seconds per connection is better than wasting a kilo of nerves every six weeks.

Writing a long article on the wiki about what I can and can’t do on the new servers. At least the new ftp works but

- using filezilla ftp server, not m$’s own ftp (which seems to be untameable, being part of IIS), which means the usernames and passwords are not the same

- going without SSL (for now) so it’s possible to access it from a browser. But that’s for dowloads only, when we need to upload a whole database for conversion, it won’t work through a browser. But then it works from my Krusader, I guess it would work from anywhere.

- we all use the same password.

The VMs on it are set to single user, which runs contrary to our regular use - we'd often sit two or three of us on the same VM so we could study a problem on some clinic's server together. Usually one from support would locate the problem, find an example where it shows, then invite a programmer to try to figure it out. This single-user setup is useless. To make things worse, it's a straight copy of the VM25 from the Manchester server, which was again a copy of what we once had on the dutch server... so nothing was changed in the first migration, why now?

[nb: this never got resolved, AFAIK]

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Mentions: Jan Brenkelen, Majkrosoft (m$), in serbian