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Kill -9 With a Doom Shotgun
Herschel Krustofsky writes "A researcher at the University of New Mexico has modified the Doom source to visualize processes and kill them! Finally you can really enjoy killing that Netscape process that just won't die!" Allright, I'm impressed.
Sysadmin NetHack!
The Netscape summons help! --More-- ...
The Netscape hits! --More--
The Netscape hits! --More--
The Netscape hits! --More--
You feel yourself slowing down. --More--
You kill -9 the csh! --More--
You feel wise. --More--
The sendmail breathes SPAM! --More--
You are hit by a blast of SPAM! --More--
But it reflects from your filter
Now where's that DevTeam when you need it...?
-- Arm yourself when the Frog God smiles.
Doesn't this look like exactly the kind of sysadmin tool that needs to be bundled with Jesux?
--
grappler
Vidi, Vici, Veni
No, seriously...
Well, maybe not the Doom model, but something like Ultima.. Think about it. To change directories, you go to a different room. The objects in it are files. The 'people' are processes.
Killing a process is just the beginning. Imagine a man process that will have a conversation with you. Or a grep, that looks like a dog, which you send into a village to thrash around and bring back that file (scroll) that you forgot...
I like the fact that rm -Rf * is there when I need it, but a OO, interactive, VR interface to Unix (Linux) would be a Gates killer.
-- What you do today will cost you a day of your life.
Just imagine the horrific carnage of killing a parallel computation process on a Beowulf cluster!
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John 3:16 - God's Public License
Imagine the possibilities if it was used under NT or something where processes die an a regular basis... (naah - you'd need a body bag for all the dead admins)
On a more serious note, the idea of using a 3-D interface of some sort has been around for a long time. Using Doom (or any 1PS engine) as a front end is a fairly novel and potentially useful way to take advantage of 3-D for a limited set of tasks. I'm not sure how you'd -HUP a process (visually, that is), and there's other places the idea needs refining, but the idea is quite interesting.
I think you'd use Q3 to kill processes on someone else's machine, not your own, wouldn't you? After all, that's what "team play" is about, right?
- -Josh Turiel
-- Josh Turiel
"2. Do not eat iPod Shuffle."
Image how a shutdown sequence would look with this environment...All the monsters in the room would start to kill themselves in a quiet orderley fashion until a screen comes up says
"Level Complete. Kills 32/32 Secret 1/10". Press Enter To Continue"
Hang on...NT already does that whole enter to continue thingy...I've changed my mind, that would actually be really anoying!
Personally, I'd like to see more applications like that. Not a mandatory feature of an OS, but cool toys you can use to impress people. Stuff like:
Daemon processes: Visit the Infernal Realms (again, a la Doom) and meet your Daemons in person!
Login: Finally! We can have a giant 'ACCESS DENIED' when we're denied login! Alternately, you could see a locked door as in Doom.
Network architecture: Imagine being able to navigate your network as in all those Gibsonian worlds... In a Doom environment, no less. A room is a particular server, and doors are gateways. You get that moving skyline when you're about to go on the Internet.
Antivirus software: pump that shotgun with the latest shells, and go hunt for some bugs, as you navigate your file system and kill infected files!
Well, alright, that's humorous. But I still think there's plenty of potential with 'over-visualising' processes and commands. It's fun, and it helps the layman understand what's going on.
However:
Making it "mandatory" is just plain wrong. Microsoft is the champion in the over-visualisation. There's some times when you just need a bloody command prompt to do something. It's silly to always have graphics everywhere, and it bugs down your performance.
So... Cool toys, yes. Features? Please, no!
"There is no surer way to ruin a good discussion than to contaminate it with the facts."
..that nothing innovative comes out of the free software community? At least I've never heard of anything quite like this before..
However..
I'm not sure I exactly like the idea of my processes beating each other up. I already had the problem of processes dying for no apparent reason under Windows. Why would I want to relive one of its worst "features"?
~ Kish
Look, I'll explain what the point of this.
The first time I read this, I thought this was the funniest thing I'd heard in weeks.
But you gotta wonder -- in all seriousness -- if this isn't actually a pretty importent moment.
The idea of this -- us verus them, the users versus the processes they (could/should/ought to) control -- is metaphorically quite interesting.
I mean, the notion of allowing processes to fight back -- or wounding but not killing a process -- is pretty fascinating -- especially when everything is played out on a virtual battlefield.
It's quite frightening when you stop and think about it. Yeah, it's funny: but imagine somehow if artificial intelligence (on the part of the machines) is slipped in here and this whole thing is played out on a much larger scale -- on a much larger, much different sort of virtual battlefield.
It's funny, but the implications of this are pretty overwhelming.
Very cool.
So let me get this straight...
If this would be fully developed, we would be able to control system administration through playing a souped up game of DOOM! Do you know what this means?
An eight year old could become the next system administrator of a company!
CEO: "Johnny, my computer locked up again, what do I do?"
Administrator: "Hold on a sec...gotta whip out my BFG for this one...DIE YOU ALIEN SCUM!!!"
make the doom mod a remote shutdown and restart utility. Map the machines onto your homegrown map and wander the halls. Once you enter a "machine" that room loads and the processes come howling.
"It's time to Administrate!!" *pumps shotgun*
+&x
to "zombie process".
... my quota's full so autosave stopped working, and someone kills xemacs after an all night coding session. "XEmacs was fragged by [31337 Cl4nn3r]"
this patch could conceivably be very dangerous. what if someone compromises root and gets a hold of a BFG ? or if someone took a chainsaw to your shell session. i'm getting queasy already.
they should send kill messages to owners of the killed processes. i could see it now
The real question here is what are they "researching" down there at the University if New Mexico?
Hotnutz.com
What I'd really like to see is not process management, but USER management. When some sniviler gets out of line, it's time to go sniping!
Brings a whole new meaning to:
"What's your user name again? *Clickity-click*"
--
Does narcissism count as a hobby? --Shawn Latimer
One interesting idea this leads to is the adoption of Doom as the basis for a 3-D visulaization interface for network and system management.
.WAD files represtenting network maps, zonefiles, LDAP directories, SNMP agents and so forth, and using a modified Doom interface to select and perform actions on objects.
.WAD design back in the day, but surely there are tools out there for turning architectural floorplans into .WADs, too.
Imagine extending things like Ganymede, Scotty and relational asset databases to auto-generate
I never got into
The big issues would be (1) the one-map-at-a-time design of Doom, which would make it hard to toggle between physical and logical views of networks, and (2) the fixed-target UI of Doom, which is good for the game, less good for this. Marathon, with its mouse-positioned gunsight, may not have been as good a game, but it would have made a bettern WAN visualization tool out of the box.
Okay, now here's what we have to do...
:-)
:-)
Come up with a map structure to allow visualization of your network by the room layout (this would rock)..
Make the maps be dynamic, so that when other machines come on the network, other rooms can be added for those machines (this is probably the most important thing to do)..
Make important processes unkillable.. make processes that probably shouldn't be killed fight back harder..
Processes that die naturally should wink out of existance rather than dying.. Don't want to end up with bodies lying all over the place for no good reason..
Is there a way to kill a process remotely short of using ssh or something similar? No big deal if not. You could use something to the effect of when you open the door (that has the machine name written on it), it ssh's to that machine in order to give you process control or gives you "ACCESS DENIED" and shoots at you a few times if you don't have access...
Also, machines running windows would be represented by empty rooms with the Bill Gates Head in the middle (sort of like Romero's Head in Doom2).. Kill the head and the windows machine crashes..
For Windows NT there is remote process control, but I don't know if there's an implementation on Linux.. Must check into it. Then you could, at least partially, kill NT processes remotely..
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- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
If you like doom processes, you might want to check out lavaps . It provides a somewhat more peaceful way to visualize processes, including how much memory and CPU they consume. (Just recently posted to freshmeat.)
Of course Netscape's bot would walk just kinda lumber around, but I'd be worried about taking on, say, Apache...
This raises all sorts of possibilities like having Netscape be represented by a big, regenerating boss creature (to simulate memory leaks). Hit points should be directly related to the memory use of a process, and CPU load could control offensive capability or something. Those big skull-spitting Pain Elementals could simulate multithreaded processes. There should be cloning monsters to handle forks and execs.
Of course, extending the metaphor beyond DOOM offers other possibilities, like a Fantasy RPG where root-owned processes can only be killed with magic weapons. Killing zombies would require some special method as well (hmm, now I'm imagining a fusion between 'top' and 'House of the Dead'...)
Interesting possibilities:
:)
;-)
* Interface improvements: perhaps add a '?' command that identifies what you're aiming at.
* Changing it so you represent your current shell, or perhaps the Doom process itself... (or, alternately, Deathmatch -- and you've got to protect your own processes as well.
* Think _Doom II_. What happens with Arch-viles, and the cubes that spawn monsters?
* Perhaps different rooms could represent different priorities, or alternately UIDs. With the latter, keys can be used to limit power (lock the doors).
* Cyberdaemons with 10x rate-of-fire (and invisible rockets!) and hit points might be able to seek-and-destroy unauthorized processes on their own.
Only the dead have seen the end of war.
I've downloaded all the files you need and put them up at
ftp://foof.org/pub
--
Ian Peters