Fred called around noon. I could hear him cracking
the first Coke of the day. Geeks. Can't live with 'em, can't live
without 'em.
"NT server?", he said. You could practically
hear him sneer. "I'll peel it like a can of sardines. Back in
an hour." Forty minutes later he called.
"Got a pencil? Login is 'tuttifrutti'. Password
is -- get this -- 'mymomma'. Ya owe me one."
I FTP'd in straight away and started downloading
everything in sight. That might sound reckless, but if there's
one thing I know about designers, they don't check their logs.
Well, I downloaded almost everything. This being
February, we weren't going to need the .gifs of holly leaves and
Santa Claus. You could see this site was orphaned bigtime, with
not a file date newer than November. I left Donder and Blitzen
too.
There were too many weird directories, even for
an NT server. I could see the writing on the wall. Opened a couple
of exec files, and sure enough -- binaries only. I was expecting
stupid Perl tricks, but this rescue was going to be a doozy.
I wondered why so many filenames had the word
"hazel" in them. This stunk. I went looking on Google and had
it nailed in two minutes. Bad news all the way. The designer had
used a proprietary shopping cart from some yo-yos in upstate New
York. That explained the site's bizarre URLs. I downloaded the
cart to my hard drive, and snapped up the activation keys. Who
knows, maybe we'd be stuck with this beaut awhile.
I was almost home free when my FTP client burped
downloading admin files. Thought a sys ad had spotted me, but
no -- the cart's config files were chmodded so tight a rat couldn't
crawl in or out. I guess NT users call CHMOD permissions or something.
End of this download. It was time to check the
client's bank balance. I was going to owe
Fred more than a favor....
