Yes, it's been over a month. This time, however, I have an excuse. I lost my password to this posting account. What's worse is that doing password retrieval would fail. Something about the mime headers. However, I had a few tools at my disposal. On my desktop computer, thanks to the wonders of cookies, I was still logged in. Furthermore, I still had the SSH and FTP passwords to the site. So step one was to login, passwordless.
That was simple enough. Pull the cookies.plist from the desktop computer, splice in the appropriate cookies into the cookies.plist on the laptop, and I'm in. I kept trying variants on what I thought was my password, but those were all dead ends. So the next step was to diddle about in the database. Diddle is a technical term, of course.
Sure enough, the Authors.db file held clues and hints. Mostly, that the passwords are properly salted in the database. Fair enough. So of course, the next task is to back up everything. It's bad enough getting locked out of your house. It's worse to destroy it trying to get back in.
With a local copy, I tried a few things. Nothing came of it. Still no luck. And then, inspiration! I was still logged on, and as the blog's administrator, no less! So, the next step was to create a dummy account, one with the password I wanted. After the site did its job, it's Cyberduck again, to download this new and improved authors.db. Next, the services of Hex Fiend were used. Salted passwords were copied, then pasted.
An upload later, —easier said than done; MetroFi is free, and definitely a "You get what you pay for" deal— and indeed, my account has the new and remembered password. Then, to celebrate, I tried to get MarsEdit to work with the blog. Turns out that MarsEdit uses a different password altogether. Much ado about nothing.
