🚀 go-pugleaf

Some years ago I was working as a System Engineer for Data General in
the Rochester, NY sales office.  Our district office was in Albany and
there was a small rivalry going on between the two SEs in Rochester
and the crew in Albany.  Some of this had to do with the fact that we
had all the technical smarts but they had much newer and more
interesting machines to play with.  (For the time, anyway.  Can't
imagine wanting to bother with an Eclipse in these more enlightened
times.)

Anyway, one day I decided to have some fun.  We knew the password for
the operator account on the Albany machine.  I dialed in and added a
small patch to their Exec process, which handles user logins and batch
queues.  The patch would watch as each new user logged in.  If the
user's id was Brian (my coworker's name) it would flip the superuser
bit on.  However, the patch was *very* specific.  The user id had to
be typed as upper case "B", with the rest of the letters in lower
case.  (AOS is case insensitive, so it was highly unlikely that anyone
would ever type a user id in anything other than strict lower case.)

Once the patch was in, Brian logged into their system and pointed out
his new privileges.  They went crazy trying to figure out how he did
it.  The user profile editor said that he didn't have superuser
privilege.  If *they* logged in with his id the privilege wasn't
enabled.  Changing the password on the operator id didn't help either.

Don't think they ever figured it out.  If Brian hadn't spilled the
beans later they still wouldn't know.  (Hi, guys!)

-- 
Hank Shiffman                                     (415) 336-4658
Marketing Technical Specialist
Software Engineering Technologies               ...!sun!shiffman
Sun Microsystems, Inc.                          shif...@Sun.com

Zippy sez:
  Now I'm concentrating on a specific tank battle toward
 the end of World War II!