Log into Pistachio under the administration account
There is one Backtalk account, usually called ``cfadm '' which has
administrative powers.
It functions as a fairwitness on in all conferences and can edit and delete
all user accounts.
To log into the cfadm account you can use the usual Backtalk
login procedure used for any other account.
However, most web browsers don't let you log off without exiting the browser,
so if you are already logged in as a normal user, it can be inconvenient to
change over to the cfadm account to do some administrative work.
If Backtalk has been installed normally on your system, there is a simple
work-around for this. Goto the Pistachio Entrance page. The URL displayed
by your browser will be something like this:
http://your.host.name/cgi-bin/pw/bt/pistachio/begin
Edit this URL, changing the word ``pw '' to ``adm '', so the
URL looks like this:
http://your.host.name/cgi-bin/adm/bt/pistachio/begin
Load this page. It should pop up a login box. Log in as ``cfadm ''
and you should be back to the same Pistachio entrance page, but now you
are logged in as the administrator.
Bookmarking this page as your conference administration page is a good idea.
Note that this trick simply runs a different copy of the same Backtalk
program. The two programs aren't really different in anyway, except that
having two makes it possible to be logged in to two different Backtalk
accounts at once. It's only a convention to use the one with "adm" in the
URL for administrative work.
If at some point while doing adminstrative work, your administrative powers
seem to suddenly disappear, check the URL to make sure that you are still
running the "adm " program and haven't wandered back to the
"pw " program, where you are just a regular user.
And when you are done with your administrative work, make sure you get
back to the "pw " side.
(We should probably do more to make the pages look different when you are
an administrator.)
Look up the user
Once you have logged on as an administrator, you are ready to go change your
user's password.
To do this, you need to go to the user's Personal Info page.
The easiest way to do this is to hit the "Search for a User" button on the
entrance page, type some portion of the user's name into the text box that
then appears, click "Do Scan", and then click on the login name of the user
you want.
This will bring up the user's Personal Info page.
Note that because you are the adminstrator, the page offers you all
the editing options that it normally only offers to the users themselves.
Among these, is the "Change Password" button at the bottom of the page.
Change the password
So all we have to do once on the page is hit the change password button on
the bottom of the page.
You will be asked to enter the new password twice.
Hit the change password button, and it will be done.
If there is no change password button at the bottom of the screen, but
there is a validate button there, then that is because Backtalk currently
can't change the password of invalidated or unvalidated users.
Validate them first.
If there are no buttons at the bottom of the screen, then you probably aren't
logged into the administrator account.