Re: What is this System? Help!

Article: 8444 of alt.hackers
From: drz@raven.cybercomm.net (Tim Newsome)
Newsgroups: alt.hackers
Subject: Re: What is this System? Help!
Date: 15 Aug 1995 10:55:38 -0400
Organization: CyberComm Online Services
Lines: 37
Approved: no kidding
Message-ID: 40qcha$9a4@raven.cybercomm.net
NNTP-Posting-Host: raven.cybercomm.net
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Status: RO

hedley@inferno.cs.bris.ac.uk (David Hedley) writes:

>I was getting bored of waiting for my source code to recompile on one Sun,
>so I hacked the Makefile to use a combination of rup and rsh to distribute
>the compile to all machines it could find on the local network, using
proper
>load balancing etc. The result being enormous amounts NFS traffic,
two pissed
>off network administrators, but excellent compile times!

Cool hack! And I like the way you mentioned the pissed of admins... ;-)
Anyhow, I think this could be the beginning of an interesting thread. Let's
hear those stories opf how you crashed the system!

ObMistake:
I wanted to run an IRC bot on my ISP, but irc didn't have the right flags
compiled in. Anyhow, for a while I ran it by piping /dev/null into it. Some
day that stopped working, and I was looking for a different way. Somebody
suggested piping /dev/zero into it. (Probably as a joke, but I didn't know
what /dev/zero was at the time.) Anyhow, that I did. My bot ran fine, and I
logged off. As you'd expect this slowed the system down to a crawl, so when
the sysop noticed he killed my bot. The "funny" part was that I
had set it
up so that "at" would check for the process every 45 minutes,
and restart it
if it didn't exist... ;-)

ObMistake2:
Crashed a WWW server by having the following cgi-script:
#!/bin/sh
tail -f some/file
(The server didn't kill the process when I left the page, and a fair few
reloads (for testing :-)) assured a *huge* amount of tail process being left
around.)

Tim
--
                 Tim Newsome, aka Doctor Zweistein and Baruk
      ________________________________________________________________
      drz@cybercomm.net              | "Who is General Failure and why
      http://www.cybercomm.net/~drz/ | is he reading my hard drive?"

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