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Marking Your Cyber Territory?

Posted by Cliff on from the kilroy-wuz-here dept.

NoOnesMessiah asks: "I recently finished a relatively major webmail install for a large company and it all went very, very well. I left a '/.cornerstone' file for posterity (with names, dates the disks started spinning, 'asbuilt' notes for apache, php, etc) so that future generations would know who to blame (or call) in 3 to 5 years. I have also done this in various and sundry places within my network infrastructure while I wore the mantel of Senior Systems Engineer and even in bits of a major mp3 player's website while it was growing up on our network. Hell, even the concept of the 'asbuilt' is more than 14 years old to me. How was PHP built? Look at the "asbuilt" file for configure or compile-time options... This got me to wondering; How do Slashdot readers mark their territory so future generations know they were there? Certainly I'm not the only one who does this. I would think that most people do, even in some small way. Do you mark your own personal mailer, web server or desktops in the same fashion as you might for your employers or clients?"

2 of 47 comments (clear)

  1. Traditional methods by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny
    I'm a great believer in using tried and tested methods that have served for millions of years. For that reason, I tend to urinate around the servers that house my projects. This method leaves my scent around my territories, which other programmers can detect and use the information accordingly.

    It also helps cool the processors in the summer.

  2. My signatures by Isomer · · Score: 5, Interesting

    First I build most servers from an autoinstall image like Redhat's Kickstart. I'm sure to include the kickstart config in /root. Everything else is built using package management tools and the source rpms/debs are kept on the machine for future generations to easily reproduce the exact same machine. Then finally keep /etc in CVS.

    For things that I may not want to take credit for, or not want some people to know who did this work[1] I put a seemingly random string in somewhere, usually out of sight, but visible to anyone who looks for it which is the md5sum of some string. If I want to prove that I wrote it, I can produce the string which generates the same md5sum, nobody else can. Also, if you put the string somewhere out of the way later coders ignore it and/or believe that it's important in some way they don't understand and leave it alone :)

    [1]: I do a lot of work on IRC, you really don't want to put "Trojan detector 2002 By Isomer" all over it coz the kiddies whose trojans it detects will DDoS you instead...