Ever lose your passwords to your Domino Server?

Over the last 3 days I have been rebuilding a client's Lotus Domino environment because a few things have occurred.
1) Admin ID expired
2) Certificate ID (cert.id) is without a password to be found
3) Other Admin ID is expiring in 10 days
4) No backup exists for anything

Previously (I believe in R5 or earlier) one could merge the IDs, copy and paste some public key strings and be okay.(I simplified this to protect the non-up-to-date installations).

Tried the old way, this was an R7 server, so no luck. Spoke to my partner in crime, support guru extraordinaire, and she was also stumped.
But she found a technote which covers this. (EDIT from January 2020, IBM sold to HCL everything and killed the support sites.
However, I was able to find the technote on the internet archive so here are the links to them:
http://web.archive.org/web/20161022212642/http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=463&uid=swg21087566

http://web.archive.org/web/20180917121352/https://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=swg21087149 end of edit)

I called Lotus Support and they verified it's the only way, and works on R7, forgot to ask about R8.

Scary as the option is, the alternative was worse.

Happy to report all is well and Certificate Authority (CA) is running now as well.

Then today I get a call someone corrupted their R5 server.id and cert.id and all backups were bad.
Sadly they are SOL and will be reinstalling the server as new.
Just when you think you heard it all....