🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <11...@thor.acc.stolaf.edu>, tap...@agnes.acc.stolaf.edu (Brad Taplin) writes:
> 
> So... Who there has interesting folklore regarding the attitudes 
> of system managers towards such uses as games and "testing?"

When our system was managed by a professor he was real paranoid about people
breaking "his" system so he disabled the man page.  But then a bright student
figured out that even though they couldn't use the online manual, they could
print it out.  The prof. wasn't too happy when he figured this out...

Of course this is the same guy who changed the root login name to "GOD".
Alumni recall running who and seeing GOD logged on.  Talk about being scared
of the administrator... :-)

As far as games, he just had them run at real low priority.  Now we ask them
to adjust their usage to low load times.  Works out ok...

Testing...  Hmm...  We encourage experimentation on workstations so the whole
place is brought to it's knees when they write a recursive fork program for
the first time. :-) But I dread the day when some finds a hole and runs 
something like format...
		
						Bill

-- 
/*---------------------------------------------------------------------------*\
|  William F. Krauss III | Moravian College, CompSci Dept, Bethlehem PA 18018 |
|  Computer Science Dept | CSNET/INTERNET  -> kra...@moravian.edu            |
|  System Administrator  | UUCP   -> ...!rutgers!liberty!batman!kraussW       |
|  Phone - 215-861-1441  | BITNET -> kraussW%mo...@relay.cs.net        |
\*---------------------------------------------------------------------------*/

In article <11...@thor.acc.stolaf.edu> tap...@agnes.stolaf.edu writes:

> So... Who there has interesting folklore regarding the attitudes 
> of system managers towards such uses as games and "testing?"

As one of the two people who brought Colossal Cave to UMD I think I can
comment on this...  ;-)

We've always had this dilemma.  Games are one sure way to bring people to
use the computer (and learn things like the character-delete and line-delete
and carriage return keys :-), but it's mighty embarrassing for our president
to go up before the State Legislature asking for X million dollars for a new
mainframe and be asked "do students play GAMES on your existing mainframe?".
                                         =====

Many (not all) of these Good Ole Boys just aren't sophisticated enough to
understand games as learning motivation -- their idea of learning motivation
is "take the young-uns out to the woodshed -- then they'l larn their sums!".

Besides, they've been burned just once too often by the old Computer Center
game of piling everybody in creation onto the computer and loading it down
unmercifully just to demonstrate a "need" for a bigger and faster machine.
More power and control for the Computer Center -- that's the bottom line.

There's a similar shift in the attitude toward computer security.  At one
time people were encouraged to break security, with the eventual aim of
finding and closing the holes (and yes I once wrote a program that...).
Now that a computer has become more of a commodity, to be bought once by
the research group and never thought about again (like, who ever thinks about
the guts of their centrifuge or environmental chamber?) you see people
much less likely to actually fix problems and more likely to just sweep them
under the academic rug.  So, if you break security now, you aren't offered
a job, you're prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law...

There's an interesting man-in-the-street quote from one week after Cesescue
(however the bloody hell he spelled it) was executed in Romania.  An old man
lamented:

"It's all about power, it's all about control,
 all the rest is lies for the credulous"

I know the quote isn't exact, but it sure says it all, doesn't it?

-- 
Sig     DS.L    ('ZBen')       ; Ben Cranston <zb...@Trantor.UMD.EDU>
* Network Infrastructures Group, Computer Science Center
* University of Maryland at College Park
* of Ulm

As I once told a Navy offical who asked about the programs I was loading
into the ships ADP computers system.
"No games on these tapes only Terminal Familiarization Programs"

This article probably doesn't belong here.  Followups to comp.misc for
lack of a better place....

In article <11...@thor.acc.stolaf.edu> tap...@agnes.acc.stolaf.edu (Brad Taplin) writes:
>One question, almost entirely off the "subject":
>
>	NO GAMES?!

  No games.  That's a rule I didn't make; I would have allowed them
under low system loads, at least.  The systems were running near
capacity as it was when assignments were due (a Sun-3/280 slows down
quite a bit when there are 50 users on, even after tuning).

>If we the local hackers at St. Olaf weren't allowed to play games [ ... ]

  When I was "growing up" in CS at River Falls, we had games which
were available weekend at night.  Most of our fun, though, was writing
utilities and stuff like that; we had a "user contributed library" of
software which students had written, and some of us wrote systems
software as well....

  Students who wrote their own games, though, could play them any
time, pretty much.  We had a number of those (ranging from go-moku to
a quite fancy multi-player star trek game).

>In fact, our system manager encourages us to try and break system security
>and screw things up [ ... ]

  Under VMS, that's great--my system manager at River Falls did the
same.  Under SunOS, there are enough security holes and bugs that it's
just annoying.  I tended to come down hard on students who purposely
tried to screw up the systems.
   
+---------------------------+------------------+-------------+
| Anton Rang (grad student) | ra...@cs.wisc.edu | UW--Madison |
+---------------------------+------------------+-------------+

In article <11...@thor.acc.stolaf.edu> tap...@agnes.stolaf.edu writes:
>In fact, our system manager encourages us to try and break system security
>and screw things up, those of us barely able yet, just to see where holes
>in the system might be hiding. It must amount to a good portion of our
>cpu load but what the hell, the sto vaxes are for our education, right?
>Of course, it gets out of control sometimes.

I recently recieved the following e-mail (header obviously stripped):
>good!!!
>now, i can try to telnet and break into your the machines at agnes, which
>im sure the sys admis wont mind.

I won't say who wrote this (that would be telling), and I know it was just a
joke most likely, but with no smiley-faces and just the slightest possibility
this individual is serious I feel obliged to respond.

WE, those here at agnes who can be held accountable for our actions, are
encouraged to test things PROVIDED we let the sysadmin know of the holes
we find AND we don't go doing something stupid like emulating root just
to nuke others' files or change yppasswd to get our login at the top of
the que. When people do such nasty things here the gods find creative
ways of punishing the perpetrators, like changing the fool's shell to
/who/sh and making everything in their account world-writable.

PLEASE DO NOT TELNET IN TO ATTEMPT SUCH ABUSES. Our computers cost each
student here (a private school) big tuition bucks. The sysadmin here
remains flexible because it's understood such flexibility results, at
least here, in a supportive and productive atmosphere. If an outsider
tried to break our security two things might happen: The intruder would
never be caught, in which case we'd be screwed out of some of our tuition
money when things crash or change unexpectedly, or the intruder would be
caught and probably disciplined to the full extent of both the law and
the creativity of some rather bright people.

Sorry if this sounds harsh. I know I opened myself up for such mail, and
that there will be those who'd rather not see this kind of posting. I felt
it appropriate because (a) potential intruders of this sort learned of
the possibility in this newsgroup and probably read it, and (b) our
policy is a bit odd, from what I gather in my e-mail, and worthy of
discussion and comment. CONSTRUCTIVE criticism would be appreciated.
Remember, I have no power here, and my opinions may not reflect those
of the gods.

########################################################################
"...I've gotten two thousand fourteen times smarter since then..." -MCP
Brad Taplin, alum, magna sin laude, afloat?  tap...@thor.acc.stolaf.edu
########################################################################

In article <11...@batman.moravian.EDU>, kra...@batman.moravian.EDU ( SysAdm) writes:
> When our system was managed by a professor he was real paranoid about people
> breaking "his" system so he disabled the man page.  

This brings back the memories of a certain system administrator...

Much more recently than I care to admit, I was privileged to use a PDP-8/e
with ETOS (yes, privileged. It's an interesting architecture). Under ETOS
certain terminal lines are privileged in addition to accounts being
privileged. Some terminal lines can act as the console. One such terminal
line was hooked to the only 1200 baud modem on the machine, so that this
professor could do his privileged mucking about from home. My roommate
was doing work for this professor at the time and borrowed a 1200 baud
modem so that he didn't have to put up with 300 baud. This professor would
occasionally notice that he had logged into the privileged 1200 baud line
and summarily log him out.

I was teaching BASIC programming on this thing. Occasionally it was useful
to be able to copy a student's program from his account to mine so that I
could peruse it at leisure (find a non-obvious bug, etc). Unfortunately,
you had to have a privileged account to do this. My account was not privileged;
this professor didn't trust me much (can't imagine why :-). Anyway, this
machine had two disk drives and part of my responsibilities was to boot the
machine and start ETOS running. Once ETOS loads, you have to be provide a
password to mount another disk with write access. Since this was a frequent
and required task, the password used was written in the instructions along
with the bootstrap program that was toggled into the machine (this 8/e had
no ROM). It happens that the password he used was the same as the password
on the operator account. Logging into the operator account on the console,
I could set my account to be privileged, allowing me to do this copying
stuff. It annoyed him no end, but I don't think he ever realized how I
was doing it.

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