Re: Similar thing, but zombie user not laptop
Back in the good old days, I had to liaise with our Infection Control team who were told they had to have software to replace their two filing cabinets full of folders. (A short aside--people underestimate the utility of paper in a job where folk are required to nip off and audit a Ward for IC compliance at a moments notice. Irene could find the folder for a ward and be out of the office in about 20 seconds. Ward visit over, her notes were typed up by her secretary and stuck back in the file. The same job using their paperless system involved them hunting and pecking at a keyboard for 20 minutes till yhey'd found the file and last report, then printing that out to take down to the ward... Nightmare. We did try PDAs, but the screens proved to be two titchy for our Nurses to read...)
Anyway, the project included daily downloads from the labsystem to generate a textfile (using an SQL query) which was then imported into the fledgling Infection Control software. (another sidenote: we were all learning as we went along. I did the SQL, Computer Services managed the export of the file with a cron job and the IC team struggled to get to grips with with the commercial software which, lets face it was extremely specialised and cobbled together by a very small company who only had a rudimentary grasp of Infection Control issues to a specification dreamt up by a nurse somewhere who knew what they wanted but had no idea how to get a computer to achieve it. Oh, and it was a DOS-based system)
All of these steps required logging in to various bits of software to run the SQL on the Lab System and to access the server to export the file and the new server to import the file. The solution turned out to be fake users at each stage and for each server (no-one seemed to have heard of service accounts, I certainly hadn't. I fell into the IT role as a Biomedical Scientist who knew which end of an RS232 cable went into which socket (NOT the VGA socket--good grief!))
The trial actually worked (to everybodies surprise, personally I never thought Irene would get the hang of it...) and the system was rolled out and functioned for a couple of years, as various changes made to the IC software made it actually useful (Evolution in action)
Then Computer Services were audited and it was noted that they didn't have a security and access control person, so they appointed one. Their first job as they saw it was to tidy up user access to all their systems by getting rid of all these pesky fake logins. Cue complete system failure.
(Last sidenote, I promise: NHS computing especially round the edges of the major apps was a bit of a wild west. Our Apple //e and later our Windows 3.1 PCs were showing people what computers could do, while our Computer Services department had cut their teeth on Big servers storing data. It was all a bit tricky. And we were all flying by the seat of our pants.)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
