Just today Summer, Travis, and I fixed the password synchronization between email and network logins. Well, not “fixed” exactly, because it wasn’t really broken; it just required someone to restart some software once or twice a day.

Now, when you go to the account lookup page, you will know for sure that your new password will work on both your email account and your network login. The only catch is that you have to wait (at most) five minutes for the change to take effect; we will make the change happen in real time as soon as we find a way to keep it from introducing a specific and sneaky little security hole.

Thanks to Summer for creating that account lookup system, by the way! I know there have been a few people who have had problems with it; almost all of those problems have been because we needed to enter information into the LDAP database, and not the fault of the account lookup system itself.

Once the domain migration is finished, I would like to convert more of our systems to use the LDAP account database. For instance, we could reprogram the blog server to look in the main LDAP database instead of its own separate one; this would mean that your email and network password would also get you into your blog administration page.

Thanks to the PL/SQL functions I’ve mentioned before, we could also do this with things like the UCS purchase request system, and the Physical Plant work request system. Ideally, you will only have to remember one or two passwords to do everything you need to do.

We would love to do this with Banner as well, but that would be hard. We would have to be pretty creative and/or sneaky to get that going, so for the time being, if you need to log in to Banner, you’ll need to remember a different password.