BOFH: Hold on one second sir.. [click][click][click]. What was your username again?
lUSER: BOB! MY USERNAME IS BOB! WHAT'S MY PASSWORD.
BOFH: "no", Bob.. But I'm looking further into this, and it seems you may have a problem.
lUSER: Ya? What kind of problem? Everything was fine til you changed my password.
BOFH: Did you have any files in your directory?
lUSER: I just finished the annual fiscal reports!.
BOFH: [click][click][click].. Hmmmm, I don't see anything here.
lUSER: WHAT!!!!!!!!
BOFH: Hold on, lets look at the backups...
lUSER: Thank god..
BOFH: PFY, you made backups right?
PFY: there's right here in the tape degausser.
BOFH: Bob, I'm sorry, it seems there was a terrible accident with the backups..
[degausser mysteriously turns on]
lUSER: What about my Email, is it safe?
[lightbulb appears over BOFH's head]
BOFH: Lets have a look, shall we? [click][click][click] So, you've been writing to the bosses wife an awful lot.. Hmmm
lUSER: Ya, we're old friends.
BOFH: Are these nudes of her? Close friends, aren't you?
lUSER: BUT! No! Don't look at those!
PFY (whispers to BOFH): what if......
[click][click][click][click] No problem, I've removed all those nasty pictures from your box.
BOFH hangs up the phone, un plugs it from the wall, and gracefully sets it on top of the bookshelf where it won't be in the way.
"Where did you send the pics?", PFY asks...
"From: Mr. Luser To: Bosses Wife Bcc: to the boss, the boss's mother-in-law, luser's wife, and of course a copy in our files.", BOFH cites.
"Have we arranged for our monthly raises yet? I think it's about time. Lets check accountings database, and see how much Mr. Luser was earning us."
----
I'd love to be a BOFH writer.. But until then, I live the part in real life.:) Sometimes they're just too quick. A simple electrocution? or Halon accident just aren't as much fun as they *COULD* be having.
Just imagine the fun a BOFH could have with say an ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend, an ounce of cocaine (mixed in with 5 pounds of filler), superglue, epoxy, and a few "anonymous" phone calls to his boss, neighbors, and the police, all while being the nicest guy in the world to him too..
I've just never had a good outlet for my stories..:) Nothing feels better than a well orchestrated revenge.
That was an interesting post. But I'm replying more to what you said afterwards.
You spent good time giving an informative message, which when you hit submit, it honestly should have taken..
At the risk of sounding off-topic, I agree with you completely about the lameness filter.. Sometimes switching your input type from "Plain Old Text" to "Code" will help, but there's another filter it'll frequently be caught on bitching about too much whitespace or redundant lines. Last time, I was trying to show examples of our our DNS worked.. 18 lines with word "Address: ", and half starting with one/24 or another.. I striped out whitespace, added lines, I almost gave up, but one word finally made it click..
I can't imagine what would happen if I actually posted a significantly long chunk of code for someone, that I *COULDN"T* strip anything out of.. What do I do, write a novel behind it just to fill space to make their percentages match what a normal message should read like?
I do sympathise with them though. We get abusers on our systems all the time too, but in our case, we have an abuse button, where an abuse moderator can dump the message because it was bad.. It would seem to be an easy enough mod for here. If something gets modded down to -2, it never shows to anyone (effectively deleted). I know I should have some outragously high Karma by now (now only known as "Excellent")
They still need to do some work on here.. Too bad the bugs show up when we try doing in depth posts..:(
I think the more important question is, if this *DOES* come to trial, are they going to charge for admission? It's starting to sound like it would be the most entertaining thing I've seen in years!
Hmmmm. But in Utah? Isn't it kind of religious out there? I'm not sure I'm allowed in that state. For some reason, there's a booming voice every time I go near a church that says "You Aren't Welcome Here.".. My girlfriend won't sit anywhere near me, even at weddings, in fear of being struck by lightning.. I think Utah is one of those states that may turn itself inside out just for me attempting to cross the border. Just picture that whole Moses parting that river thing, in reverse.
Maybe it'd be fun after all..:)
All joking aside, it would be interesting to listen to. I want to know how SCO owns all Unix's and the idea of how they work, and even Linux, although their parent company (correct me if I got that part wrong) was selling a distribution for years..
Poor Linus though, he can't put an X on his name to name his program Linux.. I guess that means Malcom-X is just Malcom again or he owes SCO money.:)
Our users hate it when *I* assign their passwords. They're given exactly one chance to pick a strong password (when they sign up). If someone guesses their password and it gets out to a password site or whatever, my script assigns their new password.
chars.txt is a plain text file of any characters I'd like for them to use. This gives 54^8 (72,301,961,339,136) combinations. I leave out common typing mistakes like Zero = uppercase o One = lowercase L One = uppercase i
I think 72 trillion combinations is slightly safer than top 100 common passwords, or words that show up in the short version of the common dictionary files.:)
I use this for our own internal passwords too, but at least I let people keep running it til they see something that pleases them. "Oh ya, that's one I'll remember." Just feel sorry for people just starting on our staff on password-change day..:)
----- #!/usr/bin/perl
# Define our character sets here, leaving out difficult (similiar) characters
Of course, for less secure applications, I've just used "no".. So, when someone asks "What's your password?", I just answer "no". They get pissed off, I take the keyboard, tap no[enter] real quick, and they wonder what I really typed.:)
BTW, for you copyright happy people out there, that join line was stolen from one of the O'Reilly books.. So, sue me.
My own survey of 267,000 passwords, here are the top ones.. If we've found them abused, they've already been changed, which I believe is why "password" is lowered from the #1 position to #2..:)
Other than these, the users name, with the variations of a leading or trailing numeral, or the name spelled backwards also rank very high, but of course, don't show properly in this list..
Sadly enough, people very frequently try to pick the same userid and password, which we no longer allow. We have some people who are *VERY* into their cars, and one who was upset because he couldn't have the name of his favorite car (Honda).. I pulled a quick report of the car manufacturers I could think of.. There are lots of variations on Chevy and Ford and their models. On one site, someone even has the userid of "Yugo".. I guess you have to have pride in what you drive.:)
If I had coded the worm, I would have gzip'd in a good dictionary file just to make things simplier.
The web site password crackers that I've seen use dictionary files, and for the passwords they try:
word drow (word backwards) [0-9]word (read as regex, not literal) word[0-9] [0-9]drow drow[0-9]
Then they try the above with all caps, alternating capitalization, and swapping numbers for letters. (like zero for "oh", or three for "ee")
Anyone who reads this and now realizes that I hit your userid:passwd, *CHANGE YOUR PASSWORD*. You're using a stupid password, and if it's anything someoen wants to get into, they will. Even if it seems simple like a password to a web site, your web Email, or your Windows file share that no one is suppose to use.
BTW, in-store machines, like cash registers and those self-serve photo stations use words that are just as simple..
I had a few drinks before I went shopping the other day. My friend was waiting for them to find his cigarettes, so I was standing by one of the Kodak scanning stations. I tried the basic ones (1234 - 4321 - 12345), so I looked at the sales reciept. I found the store number, and voila, I was in.. I didn't bother to do anything else, I was hungry, so I went home.:) I figure if it took me 30 seconds with a buzz, it's probably too easy. BTW, there are all kinds of interesting options to set on those machines.:)
As I recall, I had some old old Slackware machines . I don't even remember the version number, but I think they started out with a 2.0.x kernel. On most of our machines, I didn't really want to take them down til they died of old age or whatever (usually we wanted faster machines over time), but kept upgrading the kernels on some occasionally for new features.. As I recall, we just couldn't get the 2.4.x kernels to even compile on them, without library upgrades, which I wasn't prepared to do (and probably mess up) on a whole bunch of machines.:)
But, I'm sure there are plenty of people out there with 2.2.x still, who haven't had a need to upgrade. I was just working on a machine a few days ago, that is, and there's no need to upgrade, it works fine.
> uname -a Linux foo.bar.com 2.2.13 #3 Sun Nov 21 18:45:36 EST 1999 i586 unknown
That machine is still running strong. We just upgraded the CPU, motherboard, and memory, but it was all compatable with the drivers that were compiled in back in 1999..:) The CPU went up from an AMD 300Mhz to AMD 450Mhz.. hehe. Free upgrades are the best, right?
Hehe.. Igor writes those himself.. We try to get him to fix the errors, but they always keep popping up.. He uses a WYSIWYG editor.. We've been trying for years to get converted over to something automated. It's written and running, but he still insists on doing it manually..
I resemble that remark.:) Check the other posting Here
If it wasn't for porn, I wouldn't be able to play with so many servers, and play with our fast networking equipment. I'd probably be at po-dunk hosting company exploring the wonders of my T1, and the 3 servers on it..:)
This is our bandwidth usage at our New York 1Gb line.. (one of three). I grabbed it right from our monitoring and put it up, unmodified. Our graph reads left to right (obviously, look at the numbers). Times at the bottom are marked in Eastern.
We follow very typical curves, that follow the workday of the typical US office worker.
6am, people start waking up and heading to work.
9:30am, we post our updates, which sync with the web servers at 10am (note the roughly 100Mb/s jump). We were playing with servers at 11:30 to noon, so excuse the dip. That traffic went to Florida.
Between 1pm and 4pm, traffic dips down while people are have lunches..
Between 4pm and 6pm, people have come back from lunch, get in some porn (usually equal to the morning peak).
6pm to 9pm, people are driving home, having dinner with the family, playing with the kids, molesting the babysitter, hearing about headaches from the wife. Whatever they do, it's none of my business.
9pm, traffic picks up as the kids go to bed, and the wife downs her third vodka martini and goes to bed alone. It comes up a bit (when you'd *THINK* it should be highest), until midnight to 1am, when it then drops off..
1am to 6am, most people are asleep. Consider most of the users to be over in the European timezones.. Oh ya, and you night owls..:)
I know people *LOVE* their company bandwidth..:)
Our curves are like this every day.. The Florida and New York 1Gb lines match almost exactly. Todays peak was 342.3 in New York. That makes it 684Mb/s between Florida and New York. Add a few hundred Mb/s more for our locations in San Diego, and Los Angeles (three of them).
BTW, I'm sure everyone would love what we put together in Los Angeles. 1Gb/s fiber between all our cabinets. No more silly 100Mb/s cables between switches.:)
For those interested, we do free hosting for adult sites. Check out http://proadult.com. If you want to get a sweet deal on bandwidth, check out http://l3vip.com.. Since it's on topic, I couldn't help but advertise a little bit..
Too many people thought that putting up more pages to be caught by the search engines are the way to market.. That's unfortunate.. Search for a few adult key words, and you'll find thousands of garbage pages. You may accidently even find one good one..
Mainstream just isn't the same.. Well, except for the mainstream words that keep showing up on those bad porn pages.. Like someone searching for Microsoft Service Packs really wants porn?? It'd be nice if they'd just think.
Porn is a good chunk of it.. A few years back, MaeEast had their bandwidth graphs available to the general public. At the time our usage was 10% of their total.
Right now, our networks pull between 800Mb/s and 1Gb/s peak weekly.. 500Mb/s are just voyeurweb.com. BTW, MRTG does *NOT* like measuring that much. I have composite graphs of most of our facilities to show how they all work together, but the big graph of everything falls apart, unfortunately. I wanted to put it on our front page.:)
We are dedicated to lots more bandwidth than that, but it's not all porn. For those interested, you can buy from l3vip.com.. We get great rates because we buy so much bandwidth
I know of one other company that has 2Gb/s that is mostly utilized (they're begging for another 1Gb/s, but can't get it because of not paying their bills), and the majority of their traffic is porn. They have some mainstream sites, but honestly they don't use a lot of bandwidth.
I'd be willing to bet places like Pornholio, VideoSecrets, and Hustler have a rather substantial bandwidth bill every month. They sell permission to stream video from their servers, and have a whole lot of viewers (we supply quite a from from ProAdult.com and Quantum.ProAdult.com)
I was out hunting for servers.. Short of buying from IBM or SGI, where would someone get a 16CPU machine? I found quad-CPU motherboards from Tyan, SuperMicro, and AMI, and a variety of stuff on Intel's site, if you dig around enough, but nothing any higher.. I'd be happy if I could even find an 8CPU machine, where I wasn't locked into buying the rest of that vendors hardware. I like the flexability of putting anything I want on..
Did I say 1? Sometimes I have brain-farts when I'm typing.:) Maybe I should just use english.:)
Sometimes people ask for jbod/appending, sometimes striping (not mirroring), and don't understand when I say "But, if you loose a drive, you loose it all."
I just don't like mirroring for how much space it takes (50%)
This sounds familiar.. We've put together our own "distribution" based on Slackware here too.. We made a 160Mb ISO image, so any of our people can take any machine, and make a server out of it in 5 minutes.. I say 5 minutes, because that's the typical time it takes from when you plug the power cord in, to when you shut it off.
It includes all the libraries, utilities, and server parts that we require for just about everything, with our own RC files and tweaks. It includes tight monolithic kernels for hardware platforms we use frequently (such as the Asus 1400r's).
Installation is exactly this:
1) Plug power cord in.
2) Set BIOS up for normal server operation (change "Halt On Errors" to none, "AC Power Loss" to "On", and boot order to "Floppy, CD, HDA".
3) Insert CD and boot.
4) Log in, mount CD, and type "install.os". Instructions were on the boot screen.
5) reboot.
Step 4 needs fine tuning. This is the first ISO we've made from Linux, so it still has the Slackware root image. install.os is on the cd part..
I've never really felt that something like this really needs to be redistributed though. Is there much of a demand for something like this?
We started doing this years ago, because I was tired of installing, then taking 1/2 hour to make all our changes before we could use it.. Now we just install and put the machines in a pile. When they're delegated, we put them in at the colo, assign an IP, and they're done. The developer or site manager (usually me) can make whatever customizations they'd like.
We used to include a web server, but since versions of Apache change frequently enough, and everyone wants something different, I stopped doing that now. We use no less than 4 varieties of web servers, depending on who's working on it and what they want done.
I was thinking of putting this, along with some of our interesting custom tools (like BoT, our monitoring software) up on a site. I guess this is a good time to ask if there's interest in it..:)
Mmmmm.. I'll have to go look at those.. I like the idea of a 12 channel SATA controller. I believe I saw references to 3ware being Linux friendly. I suppose their new products are too?
I'm not looking to do another array any time in th immediate future, so hopefully when I do, SATA drives will be more popular. I know the ASUS motherboard we bought a couple weeks ago was set up for it, and even came with the cables.:)
I agree completely. I only do RAID5, but some people insist on RAID0 or RAID1.. So let 'em.. They're the ones that will have to live with the disaster of losing the whole array from a single drive failure..
I've replaced several drives in RAID5's (mostly due to overheating in a 90+ degree office), so trust me, I know RAID5 will save you.:)
When I worked in a computer store, we mostly sold parts to idiots who thought they could build their own computers.. We had ever error taht you could imagine. I had a couple people who honestly knew what they were doing bring in computers that smoked just like yours.. We'd open the case, see the chared speaker wires, and laugh..:) I'd always just give them a new speaker, and send them on their way..
It wasn't really their fault. Just a simple mistake. But it was always funny. They'd be all worried, and we'd just look and see it was only the speaker.:)
Hmmm.. I think the worst damage that I ever tried to repair was a good lightning strike..
We used to have live cams running to a strip club. There were two cat5 cables and two coax cables strung up between two buildings..
Florida is great for it's thunderstorms. The odds are pretty good that no matter what your stuff will get hit.
Well, in this case, the lightning hit the cables that were strung between the buildings.. The girls in the strip club said they saw fireballs at the cameras, and that it sounded like a gunshot in the club. They had the best view.
At the other end of the cables was a server room (in the next building). Someone in the next room said they saw the flash, even though they didn't have a direct view, and again it sounded like a gunshot.
Three cameras in the club were destroyed. A digitizing server lost its video capture card, motherboard, video card, and network card. The switch that one of the cat5 cables went to lost one port (the other 15 were fine). An APC UPS was toasted.
All the parts smelled burnt. The components of the server had obvious burns in them. The chip on the video card had a large hole, like there was an explosion, where I assume the lightning came out and into other components. The housings on the cameras were chared and warped.
There were burn marks on the building, where the cable came in.. It was very visible on the white paint. The inside of the club was painted black, so we couldn't see burn marks on the interior.
I used the memory, CPU, hard drive, case and power supply from the toasted digitizing server, with a new motherboard, and cards, and it started right up. I was pretty much amazed.
The machine continued to work with the new components til we retired it a few years later.
The two coax cables were trashed. I think they melted somewhere around the impact point. One of the cat5 cables never survived. We couldn't find any single wires with conductivity. One of the cat5 cables worked, but we always had like 1% packet loss across the wire after that.
I can think of other damages that I've worked with, but it's nothing as exciting. Mostly overheated machines (90+ degree room temps, with no case cooling), dropped machines and monitors. Girls in cam houses have a tendency of not liking their equipment, and seeing if they bounce. I saw one throw a Sony HandyCam on the floor (from another cam in the house), then call me asking why the cam didn't work. "I saw you throw it down, of course it doesn't work." The boss wouldn't take it from her check though, dammit.
I do remember one day, a full height SCSI drive kind of fell out of a server, because it was never screwed in. The SCSI cable held it up, but it cracked the controller board. We soldered it, and it amazingly worked for a few more years.
I know of a 1u server that kind of fell out of the back of a truck, about 2.5 feet to the ground. It has shifted while the truck was being driven. Me and the other guy looked at each other and said "oops". We plugged it in, and it worked.. We did various things to see if anything had failed, and it had not.. So, we plugged it in and left it running. It's never had a problem. I think it's been running for about 3 years now.. Not too bad. Honestly, I think FedEx is rougher with the equipment than that, so we were easy on it.:)
I worked in a warehouse (WalMart distribution, Brooksville, Fl.) as Quality Assurance, years ago.. I've seen TV's fall from the top racks before. a 30 foot drop for a TV pretty much ensures that it won't be working, especially when the box crushed, and you can see pieces of glass on the ground.:)
A few times, we saw pieces fall from high racks. If the box wasn't damanged, and we didn't see physical damage to the unit, we'd put it back up to be shipped. I'm never surprised when I buy a component that doesn't work. I know someone in a warehouse did exactly the same thing. "Umm, looks ok, ship it."
We've done this before, but usually just go with arrays.. It's easy enough in a regular PC.. My prefered way to do it is, get something like the Promise UltraTrak SX8000, and put 8 200Gb IDE drives in it.. If you do RAID0, that'll give you 1.6Tb.. If you do RAID5, it'll give you 1.4Tb.. Linux sees it as a single SCSI drive. It's a lot cheaper than getting a whole bunch of SCSI drives.
With 8 250Gb Maxtor drives, he could have 1.75Tb per array.:) Then he could use the same method to append them to each other.. Whoohoo.. Imagine 14 of those arrays chained together, and let Linux append them to each other.. 24TB..:)
I'm curious. What did he use to allow him to put so many IDE drives in the same machine? Off the top of my head, I believe he can use PCI cards that have 2 IDE controllers on each, allowing 4 drives.. Did he have 4 of those, plus the onboard IDE controllers? The pictures are going really slow to load..
I have a server now, that has 8 120Gb IDE drives, with a Promise internal RAID card, which works ok.. It freaks out under load though, so I don't recommend that. We don't use it for a web server any more. It's just a backup machine now, with 840Gb storage.:)
So, it uses my credit history and banking history to decide if I'm allowed to fly? Sounds like airtravel is only for upper-class people, and not for us "commoners"...
Transportation officials say a contractor will be picked soon to build the nationwide computer system, which will check such things as credit reports and bank account activity and compare passenger names with those on government watch lists.
So..
For myself: Credit History: low to moderate Bank History: recent purchases of gas, guns, or large widthdrawls Gov't watchlist: FBI - Cybercrimes
I'm going to have a "RED" rating, which means no air travel according to the article... Do you think this will be open for discussion at the terminal?
Lets not even talk about how many travelers won't be going to DefCon next year.:) (Aug 1-3, Las Vegas, for those who don't know).
My credit history is a long run of usually breaking even (and sometimes not), and a few years of decent income and fixing past debts.
My bank history is mixed.. I've had some idiots at banks really mess up my attitude towards banks (see my previous rants). So I've had large sums of cash in banks, and then move the cash.
We won't discus why I'd be watched by the feds.:)
Consider this.. I'm going out of town for a month (like I did around Christmas).. I may take most of the cash out of my bank account (95%+) to have spending cash, since one of the credit bureaus completely hosed my rating and the bank won't issue me one of those handy-dandy Visa debit cards. I don't have a credit card that I could live on for a few days on the road, much less a month.
I do own guns. I have a small collection. I'm a red-blooded American, and that's one of the founding features of America is the right we have to own guns. Imagine George Washington saying "Now that we've become an independant nation, everyone hand over their guns." hahaha.
I'd almost guarantee that I'll flag as yellow or red if I'm going on vacation.
I wonder if trans-oceanic cruises will pick up more sales now.. If you can't fly in America, you sure won't be able to go anywhere but the Americas (North, Central, or South), unless someone else knows a good way to get to Europe, Asia, or Austraila without a plane.
I know it's a 6-8 hour flight across America, or 40+ hours of driving. They're going to be pushing transportation back years if they say any percentage of America can no longer fly.
Maybe they're just trying to make up for the bucks that the US Federal Gov't has been loosing into Amtrak every year.:)
I frequently talk to someone in Russia, and he really relates the happenings in America to the old Soviet controls over it's people.. Even down to the name "Homeland Security".
Maybe I should just make up a few extra sets of papers. One I travel with. One I get hotels with, and then one that's really me.:)
I've read through this thread, but just kind of randomly chose your message to put my reply on.
Everyone seems to forget about the legal concent of "eminent domain". That is, the government (federal, state, and/or local) has the right to take any property it requires for a public purpose, as long as the owner is compensated fair market value.
I was introduced to the concept when I was a kid. The state was considering a new highway. But, some of the land owners on the proposed route refused to sell. The state was offering slightly over the value of their property to be more than fair. When they were finally ready to do the road, the state took the land, and gave them fair market value for their property.
This interaction wasn't a matter of days or weeks. This went on for years before the state finally said "we're taking it, get off.", so they knew what was coming.
It's a pretty big card for the gov't to play, but it does get played frequently.
The most common use I've heard of is for highway expansion, because people rarely want to give up their homes. In the case of my story above, most of the landholders that wouldn't see were in rusted out mobile homes, and the state was being nice by giving them the opprotunity to live somewhere else, as they would have never sold their property for anything anyways.
In this situation, if the government sees the software as a property that is required to better the public's protection, they'll take a copy, and reimburse the owner fair market value. Unfortunately, that will be $0.00 , since it's free open-source property. They probably wouldn't even notify him that it was being done.
In your example, on the other hand, if WinXP uses Linux kernel source, that doesn't fall under this.. If it's found that they *DO*, they've broken Linus' licensing, and are liable. No matter how much Microsoft would like to belive it, they aren't the gov't.
If the gov't decided they wanted to use Linux to run their new tanks or super-duper death ray gun, and Linus said "no", they would anyways, because the gov't can do anything they want.
Remember that if you do make a prototype of something that would be appealing for gov't use, they may just tell you "it's ours now", and pay you what they feel is appropriate.
I'm keeping the super-duper death ray gun that I have in my closet a secret.:)
I wonder how their ISP exemption is worded. If I, as Joe Spammer, buy at T1 from a provider (say UUNet), and spam off it 24/7, but I also have one hosting customer on the line, then I am an ISP. Am I at this point exempt by their law?
Little mis-wordings leave big loopholes. Most of the spammers that I've talked to buy fairly big lines (T3's, 100Mb/s dedicated, etc, etc), and usually have at least one box hosted with them for whatever reason. Not by design, usually as favors to friends, but they're still providing an Internet Service (ISP = Internet Service Provider).
The company I work for, we buy huge amounts of bandwidth, and for the most part host ourselves.. Does that qualify us to send spam? We don't, and know our customers don't like it, and our provider wouldn't allow it (I've talked to our providers abuse guy several times on other issues, but I already know he's hard against), so we never will, but by that new law we should use our new-found ability.
I wonder if the market for toner cartridges and hair growth formula are really that good.
Slashdot Mirror
BOFH: Hold on one second sir.. [click][click][click]. What was your username again?
:) Sometimes they're just too quick. A simple electrocution? or Halon accident just aren't as much fun as they *COULD* be having.
:) Nothing feels better than a well orchestrated revenge.
lUSER: BOB! MY USERNAME IS BOB! WHAT'S MY PASSWORD.
BOFH: "no", Bob.. But I'm looking further into this, and it seems you may have a problem.
lUSER: Ya? What kind of problem? Everything was fine til you changed my password.
BOFH: Did you have any files in your directory?
lUSER: I just finished the annual fiscal reports!.
BOFH: [click][click][click].. Hmmmm, I don't see anything here.
lUSER: WHAT!!!!!!!!
BOFH: Hold on, lets look at the backups...
lUSER: Thank god..
BOFH: PFY, you made backups right?
PFY: there's right here in the tape degausser.
BOFH: Bob, I'm sorry, it seems there was a terrible accident with the backups..
[degausser mysteriously turns on]
lUSER: What about my Email, is it safe?
[lightbulb appears over BOFH's head]
BOFH: Lets have a look, shall we? [click][click][click] So, you've been writing to the bosses wife an awful lot.. Hmmm
lUSER: Ya, we're old friends.
BOFH: Are these nudes of her? Close friends, aren't you?
lUSER: BUT! No! Don't look at those!
PFY (whispers to BOFH): what if......
[click][click][click][click] No problem, I've removed all those nasty pictures from your box.
BOFH hangs up the phone, un plugs it from the wall, and gracefully sets it on top of the bookshelf where it won't be in the way.
"Where did you send the pics?", PFY asks...
"From: Mr. Luser
To: Bosses Wife
Bcc: to the boss, the boss's mother-in-law, luser's wife, and of course a copy in our files.", BOFH cites.
"Have we arranged for our monthly raises yet? I think it's about time. Lets check accountings database, and see how much Mr. Luser was earning us."
----
I'd love to be a BOFH writer.. But until then, I live the part in real life.
Just imagine the fun a BOFH could have with say an ex-girlfriend's new boyfriend, an ounce of cocaine (mixed in with 5 pounds of filler), superglue, epoxy, and a few "anonymous" phone calls to his boss, neighbors, and the police, all while being the nicest guy in the world to him too..
I've just never had a good outlet for my stories..
That was an interesting post. But I'm replying more to what you said afterwards.
/24 or another.. I striped out whitespace, added lines, I almost gave up, but one word finally made it click..
:(
You spent good time giving an informative message, which when you hit submit, it honestly should have taken..
At the risk of sounding off-topic, I agree with you completely about the lameness filter.. Sometimes switching your input type from "Plain Old Text" to "Code" will help, but there's another filter it'll frequently be caught on bitching about too much whitespace or redundant lines. Last time, I was trying to show examples of our our DNS worked.. 18 lines with word "Address: ", and half starting with one
I can't imagine what would happen if I actually posted a significantly long chunk of code for someone, that I *COULDN"T* strip anything out of.. What do I do, write a novel behind it just to fill space to make their percentages match what a normal message should read like?
I do sympathise with them though. We get abusers on our systems all the time too, but in our case, we have an abuse button, where an abuse moderator can dump the message because it was bad.. It would seem to be an easy enough mod for here. If something gets modded down to -2, it never shows to anyone (effectively deleted). I know I should have some outragously high Karma by now (now only known as "Excellent")
They still need to do some work on here.. Too bad the bugs show up when we try doing in depth posts..
I think the more important question is, if this *DOES* come to trial, are they going to charge for admission? It's starting to sound like it would be the most entertaining thing I've seen in years!
:)
:)
Hmmmm. But in Utah? Isn't it kind of religious out there? I'm not sure I'm allowed in that state. For some reason, there's a booming voice every time I go near a church that says "You Aren't Welcome Here.".. My girlfriend won't sit anywhere near me, even at weddings, in fear of being struck by lightning.. I think Utah is one of those states that may turn itself inside out just for me attempting to cross the border. Just picture that whole Moses parting that river thing, in reverse.
Maybe it'd be fun after all..
All joking aside, it would be interesting to listen to. I want to know how SCO owns all Unix's and the idea of how they work, and even Linux, although their parent company (correct me if I got that part wrong) was selling a distribution for years..
Poor Linus though, he can't put an X on his name to name his program Linux.. I guess that means Malcom-X is just Malcom again or he owes SCO money.
Our users hate it when *I* assign their passwords. They're given exactly one chance to pick a strong password (when they sign up). If someone guesses their password and it gets out to a password site or whatever, my script assigns their new password.
:)
:)
.. 8 ) ] );
:)
chars.txt is a plain text file of any characters I'd like for them to use. This gives 54^8 (72,301,961,339,136) combinations. I leave out common typing mistakes like
Zero = uppercase o
One = lowercase L
One = uppercase i
I think 72 trillion combinations is slightly safer than top 100 common passwords, or words that show up in the short version of the common dictionary files.
I use this for our own internal passwords too, but at least I let people keep running it til they see something that pleases them. "Oh ya, that's one I'll remember." Just feel sorry for people just starting on our staff on password-change day..
-----
#!/usr/bin/perl
# Define our character sets here, leaving out difficult (similiar) characters
open (LIST, "/usr/users/security/chars.list");
@chars = <LIST>;
close (LIST);
$password = join("", @chars[ map { rand @chars } (1
$password =~ y/0-9A-Za-z//cd;
print "$password";
-----
Of course, for less secure applications, I've just used "no".. So, when someone asks "What's your password?", I just answer "no". They get pissed off, I take the keyboard, tap no[enter] real quick, and they wonder what I really typed.
BTW, for you copyright happy people out there, that join line was stolen from one of the O'Reilly books.. So, sue me.
My own survey of 267,000 passwords, here are the top ones.. If we've found them abused, they've already been changed, which I believe is why "password" is lowered from the #1 position to #2.. :)
:)
:) I figure if it took me 30 seconds with a buzz, it's probably too easy. BTW, there are all kinds of interesting options to set on those machines. :)
505 1234
494 password
319 6969
241 harley
231 123456
201 golf
180 pussy
169 mustang
169 1111
143 shadow
135 1313
134 fish
130 5150
127 7777
121 qwerty
120 baseball
118 2112
116 letmein
114 12345678
114 12345
Other than these, the users name, with the variations of a leading or trailing numeral, or the name spelled backwards also rank very high, but of course, don't show properly in this list..
Sadly enough, people very frequently try to pick the same userid and password, which we no longer allow. We have some people who are *VERY* into their cars, and one who was upset because he couldn't have the name of his favorite car (Honda).. I pulled a quick report of the car manufacturers I could think of.. There are lots of variations on Chevy and Ford and their models. On one site, someone even has the userid of "Yugo".. I guess you have to have pride in what you drive.
If I had coded the worm, I would have gzip'd in a good dictionary file just to make things simplier.
The web site password crackers that I've seen use dictionary files, and for the passwords they try:
word
drow (word backwards)
[0-9]word (read as regex, not literal)
word[0-9]
[0-9]drow
drow[0-9]
Then they try the above with all caps, alternating capitalization, and swapping numbers for letters. (like zero for "oh", or three for "ee")
Anyone who reads this and now realizes that I hit your userid:passwd, *CHANGE YOUR PASSWORD*. You're using a stupid password, and if it's anything someoen wants to get into, they will. Even if it seems simple like a password to a web site, your web Email, or your Windows file share that no one is suppose to use.
BTW, in-store machines, like cash registers and those self-serve photo stations use words that are just as simple..
I had a few drinks before I went shopping the other day. My friend was waiting for them to find his cigarettes, so I was standing by one of the Kodak scanning stations. I tried the basic ones (1234 - 4321 - 12345), so I looked at the sales reciept. I found the store number, and voila, I was in.. I didn't bother to do anything else, I was hungry, so I went home.
People still use 2.2.x?
Just kidding.
As I recall, I had some old old Slackware machines . I don't even remember the version number, but I think they started out with a 2.0.x kernel. On most of our machines, I didn't really want to take them down til they died of old age or whatever (usually we wanted faster machines over time), but kept upgrading the kernels on some occasionally for new features.. As I recall, we just couldn't get the 2.4.x kernels to even compile on them, without library upgrades, which I wasn't prepared to do (and probably mess up) on a whole bunch of machines.
But, I'm sure there are plenty of people out there with 2.2.x still, who haven't had a need to upgrade. I was just working on a machine a few days ago, that is, and there's no need to upgrade, it works fine.
> uname -a
Linux foo.bar.com 2.2.13 #3 Sun Nov 21 18:45:36 EST 1999 i586 unknown
That machine is still running strong. We just upgraded the CPU, motherboard, and memory, but it was all compatable with the drivers that were compiled in back in 1999..
Hehe.. Igor writes those himself.. We try to get him to fix the errors, but they always keep popping up.. He uses a WYSIWYG editor.. We've been trying for years to get converted over to something automated. It's written and running, but he still insists on doing it manually..
Explains all the errors, doesn't it?
hehe..
Actually, we frequent Slashdot.com, Shoutcast.com, the major news sites, and dailyrotten.com..
The 700 club blocks us from viewing.. We just get a white page that says "You're beyond saving. Good luck."
Hmmm.. Looks interesting. I'll check it out more today...
I don't suppose it has an option for importing old MRTG data though, does it.
I resemble that remark. :) Check the other posting Here
:)
If it wasn't for porn, I wouldn't be able to play with so many servers, and play with our fast networking equipment. I'd probably be at po-dunk hosting company exploring the wonders of my T1, and the 3 servers on it..
Good guess, but wrong.. :)
:)
:)
:)
I've been watching our usage trends for years.. Highest traffic is Mondays, descdending all week until Sunday.
Have a look at this graph http://www.voyeurweb.com/NY_BW_day.png
This is our bandwidth usage at our New York 1Gb line.. (one of three). I grabbed it right from our monitoring and put it up, unmodified. Our graph reads left to right (obviously, look at the numbers). Times at the bottom are marked in Eastern.
We follow very typical curves, that follow the workday of the typical US office worker.
6am, people start waking up and heading to work.
9:30am, we post our updates, which sync with the web servers at 10am (note the roughly 100Mb/s jump). We were playing with servers at 11:30 to noon, so excuse the dip. That traffic went to Florida.
Between 1pm and 4pm, traffic dips down while people are have lunches..
Between 4pm and 6pm, people have come back from lunch, get in some porn (usually equal to the morning peak).
6pm to 9pm, people are driving home, having dinner with the family, playing with the kids, molesting the babysitter, hearing about headaches from the wife. Whatever they do, it's none of my business.
9pm, traffic picks up as the kids go to bed, and the wife downs her third vodka martini and goes to bed alone. It comes up a bit (when you'd *THINK* it should be highest), until midnight to 1am, when it then drops off..
1am to 6am, most people are asleep. Consider most of the users to be over in the European timezones.. Oh ya, and you night owls..
I know people *LOVE* their company bandwidth..
Our curves are like this every day.. The Florida and New York 1Gb lines match almost exactly. Todays peak was 342.3 in New York. That makes it 684Mb/s between Florida and New York. Add a few hundred Mb/s more for our locations in San Diego, and Los Angeles (three of them).
BTW, I'm sure everyone would love what we put together in Los Angeles. 1Gb/s fiber between all our cabinets. No more silly 100Mb/s cables between switches.
For those interested, we do free hosting for adult sites. Check out http://proadult.com. If you want to get a sweet deal on bandwidth, check out http://l3vip.com.. Since it's on topic, I couldn't help but advertise a little bit..
Too many people thought that putting up more pages to be caught by the search engines are the way to market.. That's unfortunate.. Search for a few adult key words, and you'll find thousands of garbage pages. You may accidently even find one good one..
Mainstream just isn't the same.. Well, except for the mainstream words that keep showing up on those bad porn pages.. Like someone searching for Microsoft Service Packs really wants porn?? It'd be nice if they'd just think.
Porn is a good chunk of it.. A few years back, MaeEast had their bandwidth graphs available to the general public. At the time our usage was 10% of their total.
:)
.. We get great rates because we buy so much bandwidth
Right now, our networks pull between 800Mb/s and 1Gb/s peak weekly.. 500Mb/s are just voyeurweb.com. BTW, MRTG does *NOT* like measuring that much. I have composite graphs of most of our facilities to show how they all work together, but the big graph of everything falls apart, unfortunately. I wanted to put it on our front page.
We are dedicated to lots more bandwidth than that, but it's not all porn. For those interested, you can buy from l3vip.com
I know of one other company that has 2Gb/s that is mostly utilized (they're begging for another 1Gb/s, but can't get it because of not paying their bills), and the majority of their traffic is porn. They have some mainstream sites, but honestly they don't use a lot of bandwidth.
I'd be willing to bet places like Pornholio, VideoSecrets, and Hustler have a rather substantial bandwidth bill every month. They sell permission to stream video from their servers, and have a whole lot of viewers (we supply quite a from from ProAdult.com and Quantum.ProAdult.com)
I was out hunting for servers.. Short of buying from IBM or SGI, where would someone get a 16CPU machine? I found quad-CPU motherboards from Tyan, SuperMicro, and AMI, and a variety of stuff on Intel's site, if you dig around enough, but nothing any higher.. I'd be happy if I could even find an 8CPU machine, where I wasn't locked into buying the rest of that vendors hardware. I like the flexability of putting anything I want on..
hehe. Ya, there's nothing to be had there.
Did I say 1? Sometimes I have brain-farts when I'm typing. :) Maybe I should just use english. :)
Sometimes people ask for jbod/appending, sometimes striping (not mirroring), and don't understand when I say "But, if you loose a drive, you loose it all."
I just don't like mirroring for how much space it takes (50%)
This sounds familiar.. We've put together our own "distribution" based on Slackware here too.. We made a 160Mb ISO image, so any of our people can take any machine, and make a server out of it in 5 minutes.. I say 5 minutes, because that's the typical time it takes from when you plug the power cord in, to when you shut it off.
:)
It includes all the libraries, utilities, and server parts that we require for just about everything, with our own RC files and tweaks. It includes tight monolithic kernels for hardware platforms we use frequently (such as the Asus 1400r's).
Installation is exactly this:
1) Plug power cord in.
2) Set BIOS up for normal server operation (change "Halt On Errors" to none, "AC Power Loss" to "On", and boot order to "Floppy, CD, HDA".
3) Insert CD and boot.
4) Log in, mount CD, and type "install.os". Instructions were on the boot screen.
5) reboot.
Step 4 needs fine tuning. This is the first ISO we've made from Linux, so it still has the Slackware root image. install.os is on the cd part..
I've never really felt that something like this really needs to be redistributed though. Is there much of a demand for something like this?
We started doing this years ago, because I was tired of installing, then taking 1/2 hour to make all our changes before we could use it.. Now we just install and put the machines in a pile. When they're delegated, we put them in at the colo, assign an IP, and they're done. The developer or site manager (usually me) can make whatever customizations they'd like.
We used to include a web server, but since versions of Apache change frequently enough, and everyone wants something different, I stopped doing that now. We use no less than 4 varieties of web servers, depending on who's working on it and what they want done.
I was thinking of putting this, along with some of our interesting custom tools (like BoT, our monitoring software) up on a site. I guess this is a good time to ask if there's interest in it..
Mmmmm.. I'll have to go look at those.. I like the idea of a 12 channel SATA controller. I believe I saw references to 3ware being Linux friendly. I suppose their new products are too?
I'm not looking to do another array any time in th immediate future, so hopefully when I do, SATA drives will be more popular. I know the ASUS motherboard we bought a couple weeks ago was set up for it, and even came with the cables.
I agree completely. I only do RAID5, but some people insist on RAID0 or RAID1.. So let 'em.. They're the ones that will have to live with the disaster of losing the whole array from a single drive failure..
I've replaced several drives in RAID5's (mostly due to overheating in a 90+ degree office), so trust me, I know RAID5 will save you.
When I worked in a computer store, we mostly sold parts to idiots who thought they could build their own computers.. We had ever error taht you could imagine. I had a couple people who honestly knew what they were doing bring in computers that smoked just like yours.. We'd open the case, see the chared speaker wires, and laugh.. :) I'd always just give them a new speaker, and send them on their way..
:)
It wasn't really their fault. Just a simple mistake. But it was always funny. They'd be all worried, and we'd just look and see it was only the speaker.
Hmmm.. I think the worst damage that I ever tried to repair was a good lightning strike..
:)
:)
We used to have live cams running to a strip club. There were two cat5 cables and two coax cables strung up between two buildings..
Florida is great for it's thunderstorms. The odds are pretty good that no matter what your stuff will get hit.
Well, in this case, the lightning hit the cables that were strung between the buildings.. The girls in the strip club said they saw fireballs at the cameras, and that it sounded like a gunshot in the club. They had the best view.
At the other end of the cables was a server room (in the next building). Someone in the next room said they saw the flash, even though they didn't have a direct view, and again it sounded like a gunshot.
Three cameras in the club were destroyed. A digitizing server lost its video capture card, motherboard, video card, and network card. The switch that one of the cat5 cables went to lost one port (the other 15 were fine). An APC UPS was toasted.
All the parts smelled burnt. The components of the server had obvious burns in them. The chip on the video card had a large hole, like there was an explosion, where I assume the lightning came out and into other components. The housings on the cameras were chared and warped.
There were burn marks on the building, where the cable came in.. It was very visible on the white paint. The inside of the club was painted black, so we couldn't see burn marks on the interior.
I used the memory, CPU, hard drive, case and power supply from the toasted digitizing server, with a new motherboard, and cards, and it started right up. I was pretty much amazed.
The machine continued to work with the new components til we retired it a few years later.
The two coax cables were trashed. I think they melted somewhere around the impact point. One of the cat5 cables never survived. We couldn't find any single wires with conductivity. One of the cat5 cables worked, but we always had like 1% packet loss across the wire after that.
I can think of other damages that I've worked with, but it's nothing as exciting. Mostly overheated machines (90+ degree room temps, with no case cooling), dropped machines and monitors. Girls in cam houses have a tendency of not liking their equipment, and seeing if they bounce. I saw one throw a Sony HandyCam on the floor (from another cam in the house), then call me asking why the cam didn't work. "I saw you throw it down, of course it doesn't work." The boss wouldn't take it from her check though, dammit.
I do remember one day, a full height SCSI drive kind of fell out of a server, because it was never screwed in. The SCSI cable held it up, but it cracked the controller board. We soldered it, and it amazingly worked for a few more years.
I know of a 1u server that kind of fell out of the back of a truck, about 2.5 feet to the ground. It has shifted while the truck was being driven. Me and the other guy looked at each other and said "oops". We plugged it in, and it worked.. We did various things to see if anything had failed, and it had not.. So, we plugged it in and left it running. It's never had a problem. I think it's been running for about 3 years now.. Not too bad. Honestly, I think FedEx is rougher with the equipment than that, so we were easy on it.
I worked in a warehouse (WalMart distribution, Brooksville, Fl.) as Quality Assurance, years ago.. I've seen TV's fall from the top racks before. a 30 foot drop for a TV pretty much ensures that it won't be working, especially when the box crushed, and you can see pieces of glass on the ground.
A few times, we saw pieces fall from high racks. If the box wasn't damanged, and we didn't see physical damage to the unit, we'd put it back up to be shipped. I'm never surprised when I buy a component that doesn't work. I know someone in a warehouse did exactly the same thing. "Umm, looks ok, ship it."
We've done this before, but usually just go with arrays.. It's easy enough in a regular PC.. My prefered way to do it is, get something like the Promise UltraTrak SX8000, and put 8 200Gb IDE drives in it.. If you do RAID0, that'll give you 1.6Tb.. If you do RAID5, it'll give you 1.4Tb.. Linux sees it as a single SCSI drive. It's a lot cheaper than getting a whole bunch of SCSI drives.
:) Then he could use the same method to append them to each other.. Whoohoo.. Imagine 14 of those arrays chained together, and let Linux append them to each other.. 24TB.. :)
:)
With 8 250Gb Maxtor drives, he could have 1.75Tb per array.
I'm curious. What did he use to allow him to put so many IDE drives in the same machine? Off the top of my head, I believe he can use PCI cards that have 2 IDE controllers on each, allowing 4 drives.. Did he have 4 of those, plus the onboard IDE controllers? The pictures are going really slow to load..
I have a server now, that has 8 120Gb IDE drives, with a Promise internal RAID card, which works ok.. It freaks out under load though, so I don't recommend that. We don't use it for a web server any more. It's just a backup machine now, with 840Gb storage.
So, it uses my credit history and banking history to decide if I'm allowed to fly? Sounds like airtravel is only for upper-class people, and not for us "commoners"...
:) (Aug 1-3, Las Vegas, for those who don't know).
:)
:)
:)
Transportation officials say a contractor will be picked soon to build the nationwide computer system, which will check such things as credit reports and bank account activity and compare passenger names with those on government watch lists.
So..
For myself:
Credit History: low to moderate
Bank History: recent purchases of gas, guns, or large widthdrawls
Gov't watchlist: FBI - Cybercrimes
I'm going to have a "RED" rating, which means no air travel according to the article... Do you think this will be open for discussion at the terminal?
Lets not even talk about how many travelers won't be going to DefCon next year.
My credit history is a long run of usually breaking even (and sometimes not), and a few years of decent income and fixing past debts.
My bank history is mixed.. I've had some idiots at banks really mess up my attitude towards banks (see my previous rants). So I've had large sums of cash in banks, and then move the cash.
We won't discus why I'd be watched by the feds.
Consider this.. I'm going out of town for a month (like I did around Christmas).. I may take most of the cash out of my bank account (95%+) to have spending cash, since one of the credit bureaus completely hosed my rating and the bank won't issue me one of those handy-dandy Visa debit cards. I don't have a credit card that I could live on for a few days on the road, much less a month.
I do own guns. I have a small collection. I'm a red-blooded American, and that's one of the founding features of America is the right we have to own guns. Imagine George Washington saying "Now that we've become an independant nation, everyone hand over their guns." hahaha.
I'd almost guarantee that I'll flag as yellow or red if I'm going on vacation.
I wonder if trans-oceanic cruises will pick up more sales now.. If you can't fly in America, you sure won't be able to go anywhere but the Americas (North, Central, or South), unless someone else knows a good way to get to Europe, Asia, or Austraila without a plane.
I know it's a 6-8 hour flight across America, or 40+ hours of driving. They're going to be pushing transportation back years if they say any percentage of America can no longer fly.
Maybe they're just trying to make up for the bucks that the US Federal Gov't has been loosing into Amtrak every year.
I frequently talk to someone in Russia, and he really relates the happenings in America to the old Soviet controls over it's people.. Even down to the name "Homeland Security".
Maybe I should just make up a few extra sets of papers. One I travel with. One I get hotels with, and then one that's really me.
I've read through this thread, but just kind of randomly chose your message to put my reply on.
:)
Everyone seems to forget about the legal concent of "eminent domain". That is, the government (federal, state, and/or local) has the right to take any property it requires for a public purpose, as long as the owner is compensated fair market value.
I was introduced to the concept when I was a kid. The state was considering a new highway. But, some of the land owners on the proposed route refused to sell. The state was offering slightly over the value of their property to be more than fair. When they were finally ready to do the road, the state took the land, and gave them fair market value for their property.
This interaction wasn't a matter of days or weeks. This went on for years before the state finally said "we're taking it, get off.", so they knew what was coming.
It's a pretty big card for the gov't to play, but it does get played frequently.
The most common use I've heard of is for highway expansion, because people rarely want to give up their homes. In the case of my story above, most of the landholders that wouldn't see were in rusted out mobile homes, and the state was being nice by giving them the opprotunity to live somewhere else, as they would have never sold their property for anything anyways.
In this situation, if the government sees the software as a property that is required to better the public's protection, they'll take a copy, and reimburse the owner fair market value. Unfortunately, that will be $0.00 , since it's free open-source property. They probably wouldn't even notify him that it was being done.
In your example, on the other hand, if WinXP uses Linux kernel source, that doesn't fall under this.. If it's found that they *DO*, they've broken Linus' licensing, and are liable. No matter how much Microsoft would like to belive it, they aren't the gov't.
If the gov't decided they wanted to use Linux to run their new tanks or super-duper death ray gun, and Linus said "no", they would anyways, because the gov't can do anything they want.
Remember that if you do make a prototype of something that would be appealing for gov't use, they may just tell you "it's ours now", and pay you what they feel is appropriate.
I'm keeping the super-duper death ray gun that I have in my closet a secret.
I wonder how their ISP exemption is worded. If I, as Joe Spammer, buy at T1 from a provider (say UUNet), and spam off it 24/7, but I also have one hosting customer on the line, then I am an ISP. Am I at this point exempt by their law?
Little mis-wordings leave big loopholes. Most of the spammers that I've talked to buy fairly big lines (T3's, 100Mb/s dedicated, etc, etc), and usually have at least one box hosted with them for whatever reason. Not by design, usually as favors to friends, but they're still providing an Internet Service (ISP = Internet Service Provider).
The company I work for, we buy huge amounts of bandwidth, and for the most part host ourselves.. Does that qualify us to send spam? We don't, and know our customers don't like it, and our provider wouldn't allow it (I've talked to our providers abuse guy several times on other issues, but I already know he's hard against), so we never will, but by that new law we should use our new-found ability.
I wonder if the market for toner cartridges and hair growth formula are really that good.