Re: Password setting having somewhat bizarre results.

Hi John,

On Tue, Aug 13, 2013 at 6:00 AM, John Foelster <johnfoelster(at)comcast(dot)net>wrote:

> ** **
>
> **Ø **Hi John,****
>
> **Ø **Thank you so much for your co-ordination on fixing this issue.****
>
> **Ø **I believe, i have found the cause of this. This is due to "VALID
> UNTIL '1969-12-31 00:00:00';" option. For confirming this, do you mind to
> do the following steps once again and let me know the status.****
>
> Yup. That did it!
>
> Glad to hear that.

> ****
>
> I told you it was something idiotically stupid that I just wasn’t
> understanding properly. Having already used the xkcd joke on password
> strength, (http://xkcd.com/936/), I can now say that this has been an
> “Epoch Fail” on my part. (http://xkcd.com/376/)****
>
> This is an example of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing. Knowing
> that UNIX time began ‘1970-01-01 00:00:00’, and knowing what happens when
> you add 1 to a signed two byte integer variable that had been set to
> 32,767, I figured that 1970-01-01 minus 1 day would automatically overflow
> to the end of UNIX time and therefore be synonymous with infinity for
> practical purposes. So I just decided that VALID UNTIL '1969-12-31
> 00:00:00' must be exactly the same as VALID UNTIL 'infinity', because any
> other implementation would be too silly to merit thinking about. ****
>
> I may not have been far off.****
>
> It occurred to me that I was also probably not so silly as to change the
> expiration setting in the pgAdmin UI, so I created another user and paid
> attention to the expiration control under the password setting text boxes.
> When the user was created, it defaulted to infinity, and this was
> represented by the expiration date being the current date and the checkbox
> beside it being off. When I went back to alter that now existing user, it
> showed that the expiration date was 1969-12-31.****
>
> So my diagnosis is that the Windows 8 programmers have left you an
> adorable little present and the code you used to read and interpret the
> infinity end date and render it in the interface in Windows 7 is causing
> the pgAdmin interface to see an expiration set to infinity as UNIX Epoch
> Start Date -1 day in Windows 8. And the SQL writing engine is recognizing
> this as an alteration and treating it as such.****
>
Would you mind to share the screenshot of "Definition" tab from the "Login
Role" dialouge box while resetting the password. I just want to compare
your dialogue box, with mine.

Thanks.

Dinesh

--
*Dinesh Kumar*
Software Engineer

Ph: +918087463317
Skype ID: dinesh.kumar432
www.enterprisedb.co
<http://www.enterprisedb.com/>m<http://www.enterprisedb.com/>
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