British Gas repairs password problems

British Gas has solved a network problem that resulted in spending hours allocating users' passwords.

IS support manager at British Gas, Terry Dudley, said the company used many different applications running on NetWare, Unix and VMS servers and they all required different passwords.

"When you entered a password each system checked to see if it broke its rules. If it did the system would reject it without telling us why," Dudley said.

Users found the situation frustrating as they would spend ages trying to find a password that satisfied the system. More than 80 per cent of helpdesk calls were password related.

British Gas adopted a utility developed by Network Data Services which linked all network and systems passwords.

"The updated software carries out the entire rule checking in one operation before the password is submitted to the back-end systems. If a password is to be rejected by any of the systems, the software tells the user why and what they should do on their next attempt," Dudley said.