> From: [presumably someone at 3Com -dM] > Sent: Friday, May 08, 1998 3:32 PM > Subject: Re: FW: 3Com switches - undocumented access level. > [L]et me assure you that the undocumented access level for the > LANplex/Corebuilder products are purely for support reasons then > anything else. We have many cases where customers will forget their > passwords or userids and find themselves in a spot as they could not > get in to the console. This is the only way we can help them to > recover from this situation without losing their entire > configuration. [...] Excuse me for being blunt, but: poppycock. Pure spin-doctoring. I can think of at least two other ways right off the top of my head. One would be to give the switches in question a physical setting (a back-panel switch, a jumper on the pc board, whatever) that overrides the password somehow - for example, causes any password to be accepted. (Of course, one would not normally run with the hardware set this way.) Another would be to keep the password information in a separate NVRAM from the rest of the configuration, so that either can be reset without having to touch the other. Either of these would be an appropriate disaster-recovery mechanism. A "secret" backdoor access mechanism is not. To anyone receiving this message: you are welcome to forward it to anyone you please. der Mouse mouseat_private 7D C8 61 52 5D E7 2D 39 4E F1 31 3E E8 B3 27 4B
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