🚀 go-pugleaf

It depends on whether you want the backdoor password to be *always* 
available,
and thus documented somewhere, or only available in absolute 
emergencies.

How I handled this in an application I worked on a long time ago was to 
have the
master password based on some scheme that included parts of today's date 
& time.
The actual password was generated by an algorithm that took in certain
constants, plus the day & month values, and scrunched them together to 
produce
an seemingly-random sequents of letters & numbers. In your case you'd 
want to
include some or all of the serial number in your algorithm.

Then, your customer support people would have a small utility which, 
when fed in
the serial number and whatever else you wanted would take the input and 
generate
a "one time only" password.

The benefit of using the date/time in the key is that the password 
automagically
becomes invalid as soon as the hour or day changes. The customer could 
write the
password down, but it will be useless to him if he doesn't know how to 
generate
a new one an hour later.

Naturally, the exact algorithm you'd use to encode/decode the password 
would be
a closely guarded secret within your company.

Brad.
>
>--
>Brad P. Smith - Software Designer
>Cognos Inc.; 3755 Riverside Dr.; Ottawa, Ontario, CANADA; K1G 3Z4
>Voice: (613) 738-1440 ext 3702      FAX: (613) 738-0002
>Internet: smithb@bps.synapse.net   or   smithb@cognos.com
>