Passwords

[DCarbone]

Hello I've got a rather interesting problem. I am a minimum wage student worker at a college computer store / repair shop, and several years ago a previous employee, who quit about a year before i started, setup several filemaker databases to keep track of sales, inventory, repairs, etc. He left absolutely no records of what passwords/logins could be used to login to edit the templates he setup.

 

It has been running OK for several years but its running on a water-cooled G5, but as we've just had another one go up in flames (literally) when its cooling system leaked, i've been put in charge of migrating the databases over to a new Mac Pro system. I am fairly clever, and if pushed in the right direction I will be able to figure out the rest on my own, but i cannot for the life of me figure out how, if its even possible, to create a single universal "Administrator" who will have unfettered access to all databases, to enable myself to change who can login to them and edit the databases themselves. There were also many scripts setup, which I also cannot seem to get access too.

 

I also have a question about passwords, the previous admin setup personal login accounts with people's names. This is a college store so the turnover rate is fairly high, so i would like to migrate those names to something more generic, but I do not want to interrupt any activity on any other databases. From what I can tell it seems as if each local database has its own private set of users and access rules, which seems very inefficient and is annoying me to no end, as i'm having to cycle through ancient password lists in an attempt to find the proper combination for any particular database.

 

So my questions are basically how do i reset a password on a database where i have no idea what users/passwords are able to login to it, and is there a way to setup, perhaps server side (we are currently running FMS8, but will be going to FMS9 on the Mac Pro here in the near future), a list of universal user accounts which will enable access to any database without having to mess with individual permissions on every individual database.

 

Any help would be appreciated. Thanks.

[AHunter3]

I just finished a rebuild of that kind of system as a single-file solution with all the tables in one place (therefore all the accounts and privilege sets only needing to be created ONLY).

 

Time-consuming and labor-intensive but worth it.

 

 

Your first order of business is to get a combo of account and password that gives you full access to those files, though.

 

Note that a privilege set ("can do this, cannot do that") is different from an account; your accounts probably SHOULD be named as the people using the system, and you should disable them when folks leave. And each person should have their own unique password. In my opinion. Not accounts like "Front Desk" that multiple people use over the years.