phs318u 2023-07-25 04:33 UTC link

Back in 1989 I worked as a one-man-IT-department for a bunch of ex-academic economists doing econometric modelling on a Digital VAX 11/750. This mini-computer was running VMS - a multi-user operating system. All users had admin rights and each one thought that they could make their models run faster by bumping up the process priority as far as it could go - which of course interfered with the realtime processes needed to manage the effective running of the computer. Unsurprisingly, this had the opposite effect to what they intended. When I discovered this was what was happening, I revoked their privileges and after a system restart, sanity was restored. I was thanked for finally making the system work faster.

yjftsjthsd-h 2023-07-25 05:10 UTC link

It's funny how many stories from earlier times boil down to "it wasn't meant to be malicious, just funny, but people didn't realize that it would multiply that much or use so many resources". See also: the morris worm (I mean, that arguably was designed as malware, but supposedly wasn't supposed to be nearly as bad as it was)

unilynx 2023-07-25 05:21 UTC link

The interesting part is that it occurred to no one to just reboot and see if that fixes it. Apparently systems were a lot stabler.

deckar01 2023-07-25 05:24 UTC link

I once had to troubleshoot the math department director’s PC misbehaving. It turned out that he let prime95 have every spare cycle on a core 2 duo for a decade and the machine would only boot if it had cooled to room temperature.

gnoack 2023-07-25 05:37 UTC link

In the mid-2000ds, there eventually came a time when the xlock (Ex-lock) screen locker disappeared from the last university workstations that still had it. People routinely got puzzled when they could not run it. It was a fun prank to tell them that Ex-Cee-lock was the replacement for it (which would, of course, run the clock application). :)

nathell 2023-07-25 07:03 UTC link

Ah, the golden student days of yore.

Mine were in the early 2000s. Back then, the computers at the lab at my uni were not very powerful, so people would do work at a Linux console, saving themselves the hassle of running a bulky X session.

Some time around 2001 I read the console_ioctl(4) manpage and found it replete with prank possibilities. I wrote little programs that would flip the console font so that all the characters were upside down; or swap capital letters with small letters, again by way of manipulating the font; or flash patterns on the keyboard LEDs; or fade to black and back by manipulating the palette.

I then added a server component so that I could leave it running at an innocuously-looking terminal, wait for a victim, fire up these effects remotely from another box in the same room, and watch what happens. Fortunately, I soon discovered that the coding part was more fun than the watching-people-slip part, so I gave up on the latter.

Another prank I used to do was simulate a successful root login on these terminals by just typing in what would be printed, including the motd, at the getty login prompt, simulating newlines with tabs/spaces (and never ever pressing RET), ending in `[root@mailhost root]# `. Then, again, step back and watch what happens. Some people would curiously type in `whoami` and be puzzled why they got a password prompt; some would step back in terror without touching anything, switch terminals and email the sysadmin.

m463 2023-07-25 07:40 UTC link

I remember lots of things like this, from the sunos days.

There was a program that would sort of melt your screen.

There was another one that would animate a little character at the bottom who would then push your desktop off the side of the screen.

and there was a way to take all the workstations in the group, and play sounds on them.

So (nearest I can vaguely recall):

  for i in machine1 machine2 machine3 ...
  do
    rsh $i "play applause.au &"
  done

sunos came with sound files for laughter and applause, and it was amusing to have all the machines in the group laugh or applaud like a crowd.

(well it was amusing the first few times anyway...)

lbriner 2023-07-25 07:44 UTC link

Since I was at college in the second half of the 90s, we still had unix text consoles for reading emails so my favourite prank was to tell others in my dorm that I had worked out how to remotely log in from the dorm (we had to use a computer room back in them days!) and with my 10 line Turbo Pascal program created a fake login screen like looked identical to the normal one. After capturing a password, I would explain to each person that maybe it wasn't quite working so "sorry", so they were none the wiser that they had given me their passwords.

I didn't do anything with the passwords, it was just interesting how easy it was to get away with.

mcv 2023-07-25 07:51 UTC link

I believe either my brother or someone he knew once wrote a program that spawned lots of child processes. He did that to test a scheduler or something like that, but it got a bit out of hand and swamped a major server in endless processes. Admins weren't pleased. But also not too upset, because they approved of students experimenting. We had pretty cool admins.

daly 2023-07-25 08:10 UTC link

IBM 370 mainframe, 80+ programmers, running VM/370 which creates virtual machines, one for each programmer. I'm one of two systems programmers with "superuser" privs.

In the virtual machine you normally ran CMS but you could run anything. Some machines ran MVS.

To direct a command to the virtual machine itself you would prefix the command with a special character which by default was # but any chosen character could be the magic prefix. So #cp ... would be a command to the virtual machine.

Bored one day I wondered if a virtual machine could run VM itself, on the "second level". I booted it up, changed the prefix character to ! (so, !cp). I could create new virtual machines inside this new VM.

So, could a second level virtual machine run VM? I booted it up on the "third level", changed the prefix to @ (so, @cp)...

I got 8 levels deep. So, yes, VM could run VM, could run VM, could run VM... etc.

Game over. Time to start shutting down these embedded levels.

Out of habit I typed "#cp shutdown" ... and it did. The REAL VM on the REAL machine shut down. Panic run to the machine room to push the start button on the console.

Of course the system keeps a log ... and the other systems programmer showed up at my door ... and said "don't do that again".

Fun times.

sam99x 2023-07-25 09:05 UTC link

In the early '90s, I was a fresh Computer Science undergraduate student at a state university. Our computer lab was packed with the Sun SPARCstation IPCs, each running SunOS. We had this rudimentary email system that everyone in the department used to communicate. The tech-savvy folks, of course, had started exploring Usenet, but for the majority of us, the e-mail was our digital universe.

One day, my group of friends and I decided to have some fun. We concocted an idea inspired by the famous 'fortune' command that prints out random adages. We wrote a simple shell script that would take a random line from a text file full of humorous and nonsensical messages we'd written, then mail it to a random user in the computer science department. The script was set up as a cron job, scheduled to send one of these messages every hour.

Initially, it was just a harmless prank. People found the messages funny and would often share them in the lab. The source of these messages became the talk of the department, but nobody knew where they were coming from. We took great pleasure in watching our peers and professors speculating about the mysterious sender.

However, things started to get out of hand when the Dean received an especially absurd message that read, "Why do computer scientists confuse Christmas and Halloween? Because Oct 31 == Dec 25!" He found the joke incomprehensible and thought it was some sort of cryptic message or even a potential threat.

The campus IT team was called in to investigate, and a week-long frenzy ensued as they tried to trace the source of the emails. My friends and I watched in trepidation, wondering if we'd be found out and expelled for our seemingly harmless prank.

Finally, after several sleepless nights, we decided to turn ourselves in. We went to the Dean and confessed. After an anxious silence, he started laughing. Apparently, he had been let in on the joke by one of the Computer Science professors and was waiting to see how long it would take for us to come forward. He was good-natured about the prank and found our initiative creative, although he warned us about the unintended consequences of such pranks.

Looking back, it was a fun, memorable prank that gave us a valuable lesson about the ethics of technology use. It's a story I often recount when I'm teaching my own Computer Science students about the importance of ethical conduct in the digital world.

dzdt 2023-07-25 10:46 UTC link

A grad school prank one of my friends pulled on another:

    echo sleep -1 >> .login

was appended to the .login file of the victims account. The victim stepped away from the terminal briefly leaving themselves logged in allowing the prankster to make the addition. It was days later with over 20 sleep statements appended before it was apparent that something was uniquely wrong with that student's login. Day after day the victim grew increasingly frustrated with the slower and slower times from initial login to active terminal. Finally when it was getting unbearable the prank was discovered.

bluedino 2023-07-25 12:27 UTC link

Back in my MSP days I had a client report that their server was slowing down after an hour. They would also use this "server" (a tower computer in a back room) to adjust inventory, print reports, etc, but after an hour of having used it, everything would slow to a crawl. It was running databases and such that other computers in the building accessed.

Every time the server slowed down, someone would go back there and restart the software, or reboot the whole computer, and it'd be fine for another hour.

Sure enough, after an hour, some fancy ass 3D screen saver came on and pegged the CPU. It was some shareware thing that someone downloaded because it looked cool. I ended up turning the screensaver off and just set the monitor to go to sleep after 10 minutes.

teh_klev 2023-07-25 12:43 UTC link

Seeing as we're sharing our fun and games...

When I was at college back in the 80's we had access as students to the college's VAX 11/750 (an 8750 Systime clone) to work on our coding projects. The student terminals were on one half of a large divided room, the other half being used by the college IT folks. Often, if there wasn't a spare terminal on the IT admin half of the room, one or two of the IT folks would use two of the nearest terminals just over the divider.

One day, bored out of my mind waiting for my COBOL project to compile, I wondered if I could capture the sys admin's username and password. I wrote a script using the CLI to perfectly simulate the login prompt complete with beeps, messages and all. All it did was clear the screen, sit there waiting for user to enter their username and password, when they did the script would mail me said username and password, display a username/password error then logout to the real login process.

After trying the script out on a couple of unsuspecting classmates and having a bit of anonymous tomfoolery I decided it was time to try this out for real with the sysadmins. I logged into both terminals the IT folks normally used and left the script running. A few hours later I returned and to my surprise and mild anxiety I found out that I'd captured the SYSTEM login password :o. For about a month or so I'd full control of that machine, and would re-run the script occasionally whenever the SYSTEM password changed. I told no-one and on my last day at college logged in and deleted the script, just in case (this was around the time the law in the UK was getting a bit heavy with regards to unauthorised computer access).

Combined with access to the huge set of manuals for that machine I spent a heap of time exploring and learning about VMS and no-one had a clue.

Trixter 2023-07-25 14:41 UTC link

In high school in 1988, a friend and I discovered a vulnerability in the netware deployment of 30 IBM PS/2 Model 30-286s in our brand new computer lab that allowed us to insert programs into the autoexec netboot sequence. Prior to that, we'd been hacking on the (brand new at the time) VGA registers and figured out how to switch from 80x25 text mode to 320x200 256-color graphics mode with no flicker or glitches, as both modes have a refresh rate of 70Hz. So he created a TSR that preloaded a digitized picture of a clown face (a popular upload on BBSes at the time) into A000:0000, and after about 4 minutes, it would display the clown face for a few frames and then immediately switch back to whatever the user was working on. We gave ourselves away because we couldn't stop laughing in the corner of the room watching all the students get very confused/horrified looks. One bonus was the comic timing of a student calling the instructor over, having him stare at the screen for 3+ minutes, turn away, then have the clown face flash when he wasn't looking.

My friend's name was Brian, one of the smartest people I've had the privilege of knowing. Ten years later, we created mobygames.com.

once_inc 2023-07-25 14:54 UTC link

Once when doing tech support at a local hospital, one of the nurses called us stating that she had "some sort of weather report" up in a window on screen, but she couldn't click it away because the most would go under the screen. Obviously piquing my interest, I told her not to touch the computer until I arrived.

Since the hospital was quite big, it took me about 10 minutes to reach her workstation, where she exclaimed that "the window closed on its own a minute ago. I swear it was on there for half an hour".

That, coupled with the layout of the desk, the description of the window led me to a hypothesis. I pressed the button on the monitor (which she had unknowingly pressed with the corner of her keyboard) which called up the system menu of the display. It showed 100% sun (brightness). The mouse would go under it.

Then, I hiked back another 10 minutes to await the next phone call.

lizknope 2023-07-25 20:44 UTC link

The xroach man page has some options that not everyone knows about

Turn on -squish and set the -rgc (roach gut color) and you can make your screen look disgusting! It was great in college in the mid 1990's

Then there were the jokes about "SEE ALSO" for xroachmotel and xddt

https://manpages.opensuse.org/Tumbleweed/xroach/xroach.1x.en...

-rc roach_color Use the given string as the color for the bugs instead of the default "black".

-speed roach_speed Use the given speed for the insects instead of the default 1.0. For example, in winter the speed should be set to 0.1. In summer, 2.0 might be about right.

-roaches num_roaches This is the number of the little critters. Default is 10.

-squish Enables roach squishing. Point and shoot with any mouse button.

-rgc roach_gut_color Sets color of the guts that spill out of squished roaches. We recommend yellowgreen.

SEE ALSO

xroachmotel(1), xddt(1)

lizknope 2023-07-25 20:51 UTC link

I was in college in the mid 1990's. Our school had hundreds of Unix workstations from Sun, HP, DEC, IBM, and SGI. Everything was tied together with MIT's Project Athena which used the AFS Andrew File System, Kerberos, and the Zephyr instant messaging system.

Your home dir would be mounted as /school/login

The directory paths would be really long like /afs/school/math/maple/maple5.3 so there were 2 commands named add and attach to mount dirs to /school

add maple5.3 and you would have /school/maple5.3 and it would source .environment script in that dir to set up the tool and it /school/maple5.3/bin to your PATH

The attach command did the same thing but did NOT source the .environment file

If you needed to access another student's dir it was explicitly written in the intro computing class book to use attach and not add

I had a lot of scripts and utilities that friends would use. They told other random people that I didn't know.

So of course I made a file that would be updated any time I logged in showing my current machine name. Then I made a .environment file that would xhost + my_machine and send me a Zephyr message saying "I just added and xhosted your machine"

I would wait a few minutes and then run xflip and xmeltdown and set the -display to their machine. If they were in the same computer lab as me I would see them start to freak out. These programs basically froze your display for a few seconds while inverting the screen or causing everything to appear to melt to the bottom.

https://github.com/veltzer/xmeltdown

No real harm but it was pretty funny when I was 19

heelix 2023-07-25 21:36 UTC link

Back in the day when a 4x CD-ROM burner was a luxury, we got a phone call from a customer we shipped a CD to. Would not read. Did a second burn at 1x speeds, tested on several machines, and mailed out the disk. Would not read. Burned a third and tried on every unique setup we could find on the most premium disk we could buy. Would not read.

I drove out to do the manual install a stack of media in hand. Got to the customer site - and watched in horror as they put the CD-ROM in the 5.25" floppy drive. It fits.

grepfru_it 2023-07-25 22:43 UTC link

Once upon a time, we had several Sun Enterprise 450s that my college used to teach Oracle to students. It was well underutilized and the hit game Quake had come out. Of course we, the IT support staff, ran a Quake server and invited all of our friends to play on it. Imagine our surprise when one of our professors we support came into our office and said "Hey our Oracle instance is very slow, can you guys take a look at it?". Whoops, we shutdown the quake server and he later sent an email "I don't know what magic you guys did, but the performance is amazing!".

Another fun one, not targeted at professors, but at our student compute lab. We had a lab of 25 Sparc Ultra 60s that was pretty well utilized. Well one day, before I became a sysadmin, I was thinking to myself "all of these servers are rsh enabled, what if I logged into all of them". So I wrote a script that would cut up an AU file (sun's audio format) into tiny parts and then wrote a program that would synchronize with each other and play a different part out of a different workstation. I vividly remember playing a screaming sound in a ring around the entire room at a low volume before playing the entire sound out of the three middle workstations at full volume a few seconds later. The lab was full. At least 15 people immediately noped out. I was sitting in the back cracking up.

Another time the sysadmins of the same computer lab left rwalld running. So I sent an rwall "The system will shutdown in 5 minutes" or whatever the shutdown message was. The professor at the time got angry "they always do this, they perform maintenance whenever the g.d. please" and he stormed out of the room. Suddenly the professor and an angry IT administrator was peering in the door and pointing at me. They threatened to revoke all of my access which would cause me to fail out. I just shrugged, I knew what they were up against and instead asked to work for them. The anger turned to surprise and I worked there for almost 6 years before leaving for greener pastures.

Ahh the SunOS days were really the days of yore

ycombinete 2023-07-25 05:03 UTC link

Great example of the economic principle The Tragedy of the Commons: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons

latchkey 2023-07-25 05:15 UTC link

Oh, my first internet access was through one of those in 1991 at college! Found a cool exploit that let me anonymously broadcast messages to anyone. Sure freaked out a lot of people. Was fun cause you'd get to see the effects of your action in real time because it was a bunch of people in the same room on shared terminals.

shagie 2023-07-25 05:21 UTC link

There was a system that a bunch of students administered (I was one of the students at the time). We would occasionally prank each other. On this DEC station where memory was scarce, one guy ran emacs.

Another guy wrote a program that forked 1000 copies of itself, nice itself to 19, did a sleep(0) and then exit. As soon as it got any cpu time, it would exit, but it never would as long as emacs was running. Meanwhile, the load (as displayed by xload) became a solid black box.

So the emacs guy would run 'ps -ef | grep procname | xargs kill' as root.

This meant that it had to get some cpu time to handle the kill, which took longer than a sleep(0) and was largely ineffective.

The second time this prank was done, the process was named 'ema'... which promptly also killed all instances of emacs too.

The third time this prank was done, the process was named 'et'. This happened to have also matched /etc/initd and the machine rebooted rather suddenly.

kristopolous 2023-07-25 05:26 UTC link

Calling IT is the right move here. Could have been an intruder or a remote user doing something important.

It's a different relationship. The department workstations were much closer to the refrigerator or copy machine. If it's broken you don't touch it and just call somebody.

In modern money these machines were between $7,000-$10,000 each depending on configuration.

To put it in context, pretend you work somewhere where they provide you with a half height rack and a Precision 7960 https://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/workstations-isv-certified/p...

And it starts acting up. What do you do?

(As an aside, I've always wondered how many maxed out configuration orders they get - you know, when you kick that price up to $100k - what's the threshold where they ask if they could put someone on a plane to visit you? 10 of them?)

Exmoor 2023-07-25 05:39 UTC link

It took me way too long to remember that Prime95 is useful for something other than stress testing.

mcv 2023-07-25 07:45 UTC link

Xlocking workstations became a problem at our university. People would claim a workstation, lock it, go do something else (lunch, lecture) and then come back to their reserved workstation. So the admins added a button that you could log someone out if the screen had been locked for more than half an hour.

They didn't want to ban xlock because they cared about security.

microtonal 2023-07-25 07:53 UTC link

A fork bomb. In shell:

    :(){ :|:& };:

xolve 2023-07-25 08:30 UTC link

This certainly sounds fun! This is how people realise coding is immensely fun and impactful when you are involved in the results :)

rwmj 2023-07-25 10:15 UTC link

I wrote this for abusing qemu in the same way: http://git.annexia.org/?p=supernested.git;a=summary

dspillett 2023-07-25 10:32 UTC link

Someone was discovered to be collecting passwords that way on our universities VT terminals (I'm old enough that at Uni plain text terminals were still a thing, though they were generally used just as terminals for email & such when the lab rooms full of PCs were fully occupied) by leaving what looked like a login prompt on-screen. Someone with much tech knowledge immediately saw it wasn't quite right (that is how the issue was found) but these were terminals used by the general populace not just us CompSci students so the vast majority of the users were not at all technical (what we might assume almost everyone knows these days was still new fangled magic to the average student back then, for many arriving at Uni was their first encounter with having an email account for instance).

To my knowledge they never worked out who did it, or how long it had been going on for other than “may have been months”, because the fake login app would exit and logout after sending off the captured credential, and next time it was run it was done from one of the captured accounts, so only the very first capture would have been done by the culprit's own account (even that maybe not if they'd guessed or stolen a password by other means first). Captured credentials were sent to a popular high volume usenet newsgroup so they couldn't track who was reading the result that way. Also, no evidence of the attacker actually using the compromised credentials for anything else, so it was possibly someone “playing” to see what they could do rather than a more malicious intent.

It became standard practise (“enforced” by notices in large all caps text) to reset terminals before logging in to be more sure that was a real login prompt.

tmn007 2023-07-25 11:11 UTC link

Hard reboot on those old Sun systems usually meant a dirty filesystem and telling off by the admin as they needed an fsck

bstpierre 2023-07-25 12:16 UTC link

In 1993 my freshman CS class was taught in scheme. All of our assignments had to be developed and tested on some shared Digital machine running Ultrix. The scheme interpreter was kind of slow to start, especially when there were 20+ users logged in. Helpfully, our TA taught us how to ctrl-z to suspend the interpreter, then edit our program in vi, and then "fg" to get back into the interpreter.

Unfortunately the fg part of the equation was lost on about 2/3 of our class... after editing they would start another scheme instance! I recall being in the terminal lab the night one of our first assignments was due, and the machine slowed to an absolute crawl. Can't remember exactly how it was resolved but I do recall being taught how to look for classmates running two or more instances of scheme to remind them about fg. (Also not helpful to machine load: "solutions" to the 8 queens problem with infinite recursion. The real lesson here was, in later years, to not be logged in on nights when CS 401 had assignments due.)

dghughes 2023-07-25 12:36 UTC link

That reminds me of a story from a guy I worked with.

I'm not sure where he worked but it involved a queue of people. He said someone asked him if they could be given priority for their problem to be looked at before others in the queue. In other words jump to the head of the queue.

He said "Sure!" to the surprise of the person asking "But you do realize I will do that for anyone else who asks the same thing?"

So they person chose to remain in their place in line.

kwantam 2023-07-25 12:40 UTC link

Came here to reminisce about the same trick :)

After a while we decided that adding one second per login was too subtle...

    echo "echo sleep 1 >> ~/.login" >> ~/.login

0x6c6f6c 2023-07-25 12:52 UTC link

This is great. Reminds me of the BASIC program I wrote on my Ti-83 to simulate the memory reset process for algebra tests because our teacher walked around and would run it himself.

Big surprise now I program for a living.

0x6c6f6c 2023-07-25 13:01 UTC link

I wish I'd had Linux systems. I was doing the same type of thing with Windows networks since you could effectively run any program as any user with task scheduling so long as they were logged into the system. Pair that with active directory and you have user info. So knowing who was where, open iexplorer at certain site, innocuous word doc, etc. The most malicious case was an automated logout batch script.

People eventually caught on to the approach and tried to replicate the remote execution but executing as themselves instead of that user so when the IT admins came around there was a very obvious trail to who had been running it. I stopped playing around but eventually IT then SWE became my profession. I sometimes wonder how it'd have gone if I'd been reprimanded though.

samch 2023-07-25 13:16 UTC link

Fun fact: Login spoofing like this is why, from Windows NT on, users have had to first enter a security context with Ctrl+Alt+Del.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Control-Alt-Delete

AnimalMuppet 2023-07-25 13:17 UTC link

> There was a program that would sort of melt your screen.

This existed for PCs, too. It was called "drip". When idle, individual characters would "drip" down your screen like raindrops, at random times, for random distances.

Another one I remember was "drain". In the very early PC days, you could add this program to the AUTOEXEC.BAT of an unsuspecting victim's computer, so that it would run at startup. It would start flashing "SYSTEM ERROR 0304-B" for a moment, then add "Water detected in disk drive A:". Another moment, then "Now draining", and it would play this gurgling sound out of the speakers (as best you could, on the speakers of the original PC). That would peter out, then "Now starting spin dry cycle", and it would play this whining sound for a bit, ramp that down, and then tell you that it was OK to use the system now.

In those days, there weren't "logins" to PCs. If you saw a PC without the normal user present, you could do anything to it.

gonzus 2023-07-25 13:19 UTC link

This seems like a rite of passage... I did the same thing with the VAX at my school, but decided to come clean and gave the sysadmin all the passwords I gathered after one day (including several with SYSTEM privileges). They gave me my first job :-). I also made sure to grant the necessary permissions to one or two obscure accounts, so that I could regain SYSTEM when it was revoked on my "official" accounts. Fun times, and innocent too -- I never used the privileges to cause havoc.

JTbane 2023-07-25 13:47 UTC link

Unused cycles are wasted cycles. /s

lakkal 2023-07-25 14:09 UTC link

We had some Apollo Domain machines at school which could also run similar programs - I remember 'Crumble' and 'Melt' being two of them. And you could run them on other peoples' display. So we used to melt/crumble the screens of the engineering students in the next lab over. 'We' in this case had admin privileges, though, and only did it a couple of times.

intrasight 2023-07-25 15:17 UTC link

I recall a student at CMU getting in big trouble for doing that - around 1985.

c22 2023-07-25 15:17 UTC link

I had to do a tech support call once where 'the screen keeps glitching out I think I have a virus' (The Net was still in theaters). I showed up, removed the boombox with two large speakers from on top of the CRT and like magic the problem was solved!

LorenPechtel 2023-07-25 16:51 UTC link

My gag was a bird chirp that would play every so often--typically minutes between chirps. There were several random numbers that went into making the chirp so it would be different every time and every noise it made would be shifting frequency, never a moment of a fixed tone (back when speakers usually just went BEEP.) Leave it running on a machine that wasn't being used...

mulmen 2023-07-25 19:07 UTC link

I also did tech support in a hospital. I'm not sure IT is a value add in that environment, at least not as much as IT thinks it is. Nurses are busy doing things like saving lives and caring for people experiencing the worst day of their life. On top of that nurses have to deal with poorly implemented and maintained workstations. Then when they ask for help the very people who created the problem in the first place come and belittle them.

I'm not accusing you of anything. Just noting my own perception that IT people tend to be very smug and see the world from an IT-centric perspective. Nurses aren't dumb and they certainly aren't lazy. They just have better things to do with their time than deal with inconsequential IT issues.

As I recall everything in the hospital that was actually critical to providing care had some specialist that maintained the system. The computer running the MRI machine wasn't bound to Active Directory and might not even be on the network. Issues with it were routed to GE, not the guy that fixes printers.

dormento 2023-07-25 19:13 UTC link

Its funny how writing a user login replacement seems kind of ubiquitous for all future hackers. Mine was in Visual Basic (5 iirc) for a Windows (Novell?) network. This was back in school. You could trivially change win.ini to set it up to run _before_ the real login screen. Mine would save the username and password to either a shared network drive or a local file, then display a "password error" and exit to the real login prompt.

What got me in the end was that a "friend" used the same trick and started copying peoples files from their network account to his own. My suspicion is that when he eventually maxed his quota, the system must've warned the network admin... a cursory look would later reveal he copied some teacher's thesis files, and that was a big no no.

Eventually this incident would land me my first computer related job as a junior tech support/network admin.

mcguire 2023-07-25 19:47 UTC link

Largely unrelated, but I was told once by a senior sysadmin that I was never, ever to send an email with the Open Firmware song attached to it.

https://youtu.be/b8Wyvb9GotM

mcguire 2023-07-25 20:21 UTC link

Oh, lord. The sheer number of fork-bombs launched by the students in the systems programming course the week the professor introduced fork()....

lizknope 2023-07-25 21:03 UTC link

If someone xhosted my machine I would run xmeltdown back to their display. I wrote in another post in the thread about how and why someone would xhost my machine.

https://github.com/veltzer/xmeltdown

nuancebydefault 2023-07-25 21:12 UTC link

Nice story! Sounds like the more advanced version of the "my 4x-labeled cupholder is broken" story of the nineties.

In fact the nurse gave a quite accurate description of events i might add.

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