Not the usual fare for this group?
Back in the 80s-90s, I was a developer at a company that made Geographic Information System software. This software run on just about every flavour of Unix out there. It consisted of multiple programs that communicated with each other through queues and semaphores. Also, being Unix it was perfectly possible to run multiple copies of the software at the same time. Every now and then the software would crash and you’d have to manually kill all the queues. We had a shell script called “ipcrm” that cleaned up all the resources that belonged to the current user.
Now the sharp eyed readers here would have noticed that “current user” thing. 434
Obviously if there were two people using the software at the same time, you wouldn’t want them to be using the same userid. Not just for the ipcrm reason, but also because if you didn’t use separate userid for each user, there’d be no way to track who had done what.
When we set up these systems for a client, we’d send out a tech to help set it up. And the techs had a special account set up so they could do some checking of the setup before the clients started using it. The password on this special account was originally just the first three letters of the month backwards, so in March it would be “ram” and in September it would be “pes”. But the techs didn’t like that, and said it was too confusing, so we made it “*”. (Note: computers weren’t connected to the internet, so this wasn’t as scary as it sounds.)
But worse than that, the techs told the users about this account, and users being users, they all used it instead of their own accounts. So no auditing, and every time one person’s session died they would run ipcrm and it would kill everybody else’s session as well. 760