kdoherty - Class of '97 From kdoherty@cosanostra.net Fri Nov 10 22:10:04 2000 Date: Fri, 10 Nov 2000 16:56:12 -0500 From: Kevin Doherty To: James Dang Cc: Justin Osborn , fogies@mbhs.edu Subject: Re: Calling all (former) Sysops! And thus spake James Dang, on Fri, Nov 10, 2000 at 02:28:36PM -0500: > Hmm. Now honestly, I've already forgotten a lot of what I did, but lets > see what I can remember. > > I was a sysop after Mr. Yee, and before Mr. Hammond. The core sysops were > dgould, dsandler, dpeck, jdang. Other notables were ncook, erosenbl, and > hhui. hhui wasn't really a sysop, he just kinda wrecked havoc, and hacked > into the DecStation when we didn't know the root password. A few notes on Elie and Hui Hui, Elie (from discussions I've had with him) wasn't a sysop either, but finagled root through a little social engineering. AIX 3.2.5 (is that the right version?) wasn't the most secure of OS's and notably did not remove the suid bit when a world writable suid file was written to by someone other than the owner. I know at least one of his root shells was a 0byte groff header file chmodded 4777. He also used papasmurf to run a PPP connection :) Hui Hui was a senior when I was a freshman, but he hung out in Mr. Bunday's freshman physics class, so I hung out with him a bit. As I recall, he was completely banned from the computer lab by Mr. Yee for crashing the VAX or something similar. I have an amusing message (and I don't remember how I came to have it) from Hui Hui submitting an essay to SYNC, Blair's short-lived Web 'Zine (back when they were new and cool! Well, new at least.) which I'll attach. > so binx was ours (the students) to play with. we (dsandler, ncook, with a > teeny bit of help from me) created the first version of Hello that you all > love. And I wrote the version in C, which I apologize for. Curses is a pain in the ass. :) > oh yeah, on the xterms, the games of choice were Xbomb, and Xtank. OH MAN > xtank was the shit, and it still is. that game ROCKS. there was a small > problem with getting it to compile, however... i think we found binaries > somewhere. we ran it on binx too. We got xtank working seperately as well (the version that fixed the bug where Carapace armor was invincible :) Much fun was had running Panzys into walls but flipping around immediately beforehand to ram into one's pursuer. I believe we even had bots running because the UGLY threading using setjmp and longjmp worked under AIX. As for historical notes, I remember when Brendan Connell and I got root because Mr. Hammond said if we could hack root on goober, he'd just give it to us. As I recall, we both exploited some program written to fix mailboxes or something on goober that was suid and used system(). Kevin Mernick joined, as I recall, as a result of the MVHS SRP. He and I came up with the Kevin Dance, also known as the Annoy Frank Dance, because we would annoy Frank Wright with it, which was really pretty damn fun. Looking back, I really didn't do very much work, honestly. My skills were really oriented more toward the goal of avoiding work, which I actually did quite well. I didn't join the Networking class, and so I didn't have to do cabling in the school. I also remember when I first realized the power of ignorance. Mr. Hammond offered to give me the Mac administrator password. I wisely declined, understanding that if I knew the password, I would have to do Mac stuff, and no one wants to do Mac stuff. Except Amir and Jason Lunn. Really, while I was there, I wasn't involved in any of the big projects, as the cabling was handled by the networking class, and the whole transition to RedHat was done by Brendan and Luke as I recall (same with moving to qmail). Oh, the other thing I did which was really pretty damn rude was I hacked ytalk to log the amount of time you spent in it. I remember Luke Bergmann had his own copy of ytalk in his home directory to avoid the logging, and we kept going back and copying over it ;) In retrospect, it's really pretty inappropriate, but it was a lot of fun at the time. I also remember getting the LED CPU meter that Dan Gould made with a breadboard working with binx again (ISTR I had to track down new code or something) and had it displaying binx's load in binary. I'm pretty sure I did more than this, but I remember slacking off a lot more clearly than I remember actually doing work :) Anyway, read Hui Hui's article, it's pretty amusing. -- Kevin Doherty, kdoherty@cosanostra.net "There's much to be said for laboring in obscurity" -- "Tilt-A-Whirl", Galactic Cowboys [ Part 2, Text/PLAIN (charset: ISO-8859-1 "Latin 1") 81 lines. ] [ Unable to print this part. ]