Jalaj P. Jha Technical & Miscellaneous Ramblings

Locked Systems are meant to be locked, not rebooted…

If you are working in a office where security is taken seriously, this screenshot should not be new to you. If you are leaving your system, just press ‘ctrl+alt+delete’ and ‘enter’ and your system will get locked to open again only if you put in your password.

Once I was busy with my project nearly finished with the testing phase. Just when I was expecting a call mentioning testing is over, I got to hear something totally different. I was told that testing team is receiving error.

Everything had gone smoothly so far, how could it be possible that it is erring at the last stage. Puzzled I moved to the area where systems that were part of testing environment were located, and found that a guy unable to find hostname of one of the three machines in testing environment, due to machine being locked and showing above message, had forced the machine to shut down. Doing so enabled him to start the system again and get the hostname using his own login password.

I told him not to do such things without informing others in the team, as some time critical tasks may get delayed. Then I got him to log off and sat down to restart all the services that were required for testing to start again, only to find that something had broken down. Next 30-40 minutes I sat there trying to get system up again with anxiety building up as time passed. At last things settled down to normal.

Hope you are not someone bearing resemblance to that guy, who despite knowing the name of the person who locked the system (gets mentioned in the message “only <name> or an administrator can…”) and asking him to unlock, chose other way… Remember “Locked Systems are meant to be Locked” don’t force it to open unless you have the key.