Yet another RSA Authentication Manager problem and lesson learned the hard way

I don't blog about work much mainly because as a tool of the Illuminati and the New World Order it is frowned upon, and because really in other than the most general terms it is kind of unseemly to do so, but here is an exception and one I may have mentioned before - RSA Authentication Manager 7.1 is the bane of my existence.

As long as it is working correctly it is a bit clunky to use but not impossible, but once something goes the slightest bit wrong you are screwed.  RSAs knowledge base is horrible as is their documentation and there are no third party resources like RSA for Dummies (or in my case RSA for Complete and Utter Retards) or an O'Reilly book with a cute animal on the cover.  You just have to hope that Tech Support can solve your problem or that you have a good backup of your database because you are starting from scratch.

That was kind of the position I found myself in this morning - I was doing the required password changes on an RSA server and as I am working through the process one of the utilities is telling me that only the administrator can make these changes.  I was logged in as the administrator, but  I log out and try again and same issue.

Start googling around and I find an answer.

There is an environmental variable file that is associated with the utility that somehow gets stuck with the name administrator instead of the administrator name that you setup when you installed.

Wonderful, but fortunately it can be fixed fairly easily.  I give it a try and hey it works.

Where did I find this information you ask - Well it wasn't in the RSA Knowledgebase.  It was from some obscure site in the Netherlands that I think was written in dutch then translated to German then French then back to Dutch and then English.  But still it was clearer and more helpful than the RSA site.

RSA you really need to improve your materials.  BTW make your training cheaper too.  I don't have $4000 to spend on a course on how to use your damn product.

(Btw the utility causing the problem was rsautil.cmd in the same directory there is a file named rsaenv.cmd and that file has a variable named CLU=Administrator change it to CLU=%USERNAME% and it will fix your problem)