Recovery via Unrecovery
Jay Chandler
In two weeks I start working up at $WePushNostalgia[1], which despite
being a 40 mile commute through Los Angeles traffic[2] is nicely offset
by not having to subsist on an educational salary anymore.
I'm likewise looking forward to working someplace where "Get stuff done"
is the driving goal, as opposed to "Don't rock the boat."
I may be dreaming, but spare me the Iron Bar of Reality for a few more
days...
[1] Think of an outfit that's very close to being Pynffzngrf.pbz and
you'd be right on track; email me if you need a confirm or have any war
stories that shouldn't be publicly posted.
[2] The Gevhzcu Fcevag FG makes that more of a joy than a bother, anyway.
--
Jay Chandler
Systems Exorcist
Tai
> I'm likewise looking forward to working someplace where "Get stuff done"
> is the driving goal, as opposed to "Don't rock the boat."
*muahahahahhahaha* Such innocence.
> I may be dreaming, but spare me the Iron Bar of Reality for a few more
> days...
I'm sorry, the Iron Bar has been worn down, in fact, too many of
them were worn down, creating the Gritty Lubricant of Reality.
-Tai
--
http://www.vcnet.com/bms/features/serendipities.html
http://www.kenthamilton.net/humor/humor.html
http://www.despair.com/demotivators/cluelessness.html
"What we have done with PCs so far is not natural" - Craig Mundie, CTO Microsoft
David Gallatin
>
> I'm likewise looking forward to working someplace where "Get stuff done"
> is the driving goal, as opposed to "Don't rock the boat."
>
Alas, you'll soon find that "Get stuff done" is code for "We promised this
a month ago. Just drop it straight into production, there's no need for
testing."
ObASR: This morning's meeting can basically be summed up as follows:
Here's a week or two's worth of work. You can have it all ready for the big
demonstration on Friday, right?
Nomen Publicus
> I'm likewise looking forward to working someplace where "Get stuff done"
> is the driving goal, as opposed to "Don't rock the boat."
I work in the mirror world where "business critical stuff must change,
now!"[1] and I try to "keep the service stable".
[1] Of course, "now" has many meanings, including "after the meeting that
will authorise the service break required for the change". The meeting
keeps getting cancelled as the necessary people are on holiday, ill, too
busy or have resigned and a replacement has not yet been appointed.
Alan J Rosenthal
>I work in the mirror world where "business critical stuff must change,
>now!"[1] and I try to "keep the service stable".
Which you accomplish by mirroring, no doubt.
Tai
> In the last exciting episode, Tai <t...@urd.spidernet.to> wrote:
> }"I'm sorry, the Iron Bar [of Reality] has been worn down, in fact, too many of
> } them were worn down, creating the Gritty Lubricant of Reality." - Tai, ASR
>
> Snarf?
Surely. I'm now immortalized!! Yes!!!!! Who needs a stinky
.sig virus to get into sig files? :)
Tai
> I work in the mirror world where "business critical stuff must change,
> now!"[1] and I try to "keep the service stable".
Hey, did you work with my notwork engineer? This is the 10/8
guy, for a lan with 2000+ nodes, 400+ servers, and 42 remote sites. He
also bought extreme switches off ebay, and resold it back to the
company. And then extreme declined to provide support for them,
apparently, there was a reason why these were sold as a batch to ebay.
For shits and giggles, he bought a 100mb line. We had 2 10mb
lines, set up redundantly. The 100mb line has not been touched for over
4 months. I asked to use it for VPN testing. Immediately, it became a
CIO priority project to get that 100mb line in. Except that he doesn't
understand BGP, and had ran off the network guy who did understand BGP.
So, he made up a bullcrap story about replacing one 10mb line
with 100mb, etc etc. Took down the redundant link. Did not put in the
100mb (which was from the same provider as the remaining link). Then
spent the next 3 weeks fucking around trying to get the removed 10mb
line working so that I can do some VPN testing.
When I described it to folks, I would show pointer and middle
finger, paired, as redundant 10mb, and the thumb as 100mb. Take away
the redundant bit (hid pointer finger). Then point out that 100mb isn't
in place too (hid thumb too). Wave the remaining around.
Problem is, he's widely suspected to have photos, hence, was
unfireable.
Jay Chandler
> While pretending to be roadkill on the InfoBahn, <use...@haderach.net>
> scrawled:
>> I'm likewise looking forward to working someplace where "Get stuff
>> done" is the driving goal, as opposed to "Don't rock the boat."
>
> *muahahahahhahaha* Such innocence.
Oh, I'm well aware that corporate life has its own fair share of idiocy,
but it's by virtue of being a different kind of idiocy that it seems
somehow new and refreshing...
Jay Chandler
> Alas, you'll soon find that "Get stuff done" is code for "We promised
> this a month ago. Just drop it straight into production, there's no need
> for testing."
"Sure, just sign here."
David Gallatin
>
> Problem is, he's widely suspected to have photos, hence, was
> unfireable.
>
We have had similar suspicions about the (now blissfully former) head of
our corporate MIS department. No matter how incompetent or outright
deceitful his behavior, he seemed to be totally immune to the
consequences. This is the man who shut down ports 25 and 110 on the
corporate mail server 'because Outlook has its own way to connect'. Or his
claiming that adding a CNAME to DNS would take a week's worth of work. Or
when he shut down our backup T-1 because 'it was hardly getting any
traffic, and people should use the main line'.
Our suspicions of his having incriminating or embarrassing photos of the
CEO were bolstered when we got a new CEO, and all of a sudden the pain in
the ass left as well.
Tai
> corporate mail server 'because Outlook has its own way to connect'. Or his
> claiming that adding a CNAME to DNS would take a week's worth of work. Or
Hey, that must be my notworker's brother, or something. He said
it will take him one week to add a class C to our external routers
(already allocated and routed on the ISP side). It turns out that he
forgot the password to the external routers. Sent a sad pathetic email
to the network engineer he ran away:
Notworker: hey, do you remember the external router password?
Networker: Yes.
Ex-network engineer wasn't going to volunteer anything, and was
waiting for notworker to beg. Unfortunately, he spent two days at home
searching through his email archives, and found that email with the
password. And promptly changed a 15 char long line noise string to the
name of his favorite football team.
David Gallatin
> And promptly changed a 15 char long line noise string to the
> name of his favorite football team.
If I have to have one more discussion on why passwords more complex than
'first initial-lastname' or 'petname1' are important, I swear there will
be blood on the walls, and it won't be mine.
And that's not taking into account the request that we add a hundred new
user accounts with the password 'password'. 'They'll change it to
something else, trust us.' Um... no. Everyone will get a randomly
generated string of line noise.
Alan J Rosenthal
>If I have to have one more discussion on why passwords more complex than
>'first initial-lastname' or 'petname1' are important,
Amusing how it's always the digit '1', isn't it? Perhaps that's as high as
they can count.
Also, when they add non-alphanumeric characters, it's always an exclamation
point, always as the final character.
Zebee Johnstone
Alas we had someone who use O and 0 in root passwords. Causing much
annoyance when a password had say 4 oval characters in it, without any
indication in the fonts available as to which was which.
Zebee
Tai
>
>> And promptly changed a 15 char long line noise string to the
>> name of his favorite football team.
>
> If I have to have one more discussion on why passwords more complex than
> 'first initial-lastname' or 'petname1' are important, I swear there will
> be blood on the walls, and it won't be mine.
I really don't care what kind of kinks you have, but I
personally have issues when someone takes a relatively unknown password,
and changes it to something that everyone knows, and even jokes about.
"Oh, it's notworker's box? Try his football team". Even the feckless
consultants who hasn't been onsite for two years remember the password.
Richard Bos
Which is why every sysadmin should have a writing hand in which those
are different, and from o; and in which a and u are clearly distinct
from one another and from o as well, as are iIl!. Perversely, written-
down passwords are safer than ones in computer files; for one thing,
it's harder to steal a notebook from a safe than it is to steal a file
from a file server.
Richard
Steve VanDevender
> On 25 Aug 2007 10:10:38 GMT, Paul Martin <p...@zetnet.net> wrote:
>
>>There have been games with passwords in the past, like having one as
>>"guess" or "I don't know".
>
> "I can't tell you."
Why not go all the way?
Q: What's the root password?
A: Fuck off and die!
ObASR: 12 hour day today performing the cutover to an YQNC account
database that was supposed to have happened a month ago, except it
turned out that yes, they really did need to load some 10,000 accounts
that were "disabled" but sometimes not for mail forwarding. After my
pointed suggestion that maybe before committing to Debacle Part 2 we
should actually compare the contents of the YQNC database with good old
/etc/passwd and FUCKING VERIFY THAT YOU GODDAMN MORONS HAVE ACTUALLY
LOADED ALL OF IT IN AFTER HAVING AN ENTIRE EXTRA MONTH TO DO IT, they
got the number of accounts that hadn't been loaded yet down to about 100
or so. YAY. Well, then there were the 431 accounts where they got the
home directory field UTTERLY WRONG and took two hours to fix them. When
I have more energy I plan to rant about this at greater length. Damn I
want to slap those people around.
--
Steve VanDevender "I ride the big iron" http://hexadecimal.uoregon.edu/
ste...@hexadecimal.uoregon.edu PGP keyprint 4AD7AF61F0B9DE87 522902969C0A7EE8
Little things break, circuitry burns / Time flies while my little world turns
Every day comes, every day goes / 100 years and nobody shows -- Happy Rhodes
Bogdan Iamandei
> [Tale of great pain snipped]
> I have more energy I plan to rant about this at greater length. Damn I
> want to slap those people around.
I thought there's already a daemon in charge with that. They call it
slapd.
Right, I'll get me coat now.
Ino!~
--
I have seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire
off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark
near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time,
like tears in rain. Time to die.
E.P.Sporgersi
>
> Which is why every sysadmin should have a writing hand in which those
> are different, and from o; and in which a and u are clearly distinct
> from one another and from o as well, as are iIl!. Perversely, written-
> down passwords are safer than ones in computer files; for one thing,
> it's harder to steal a notebook from a safe than it is to steal a file
> from a file server.
>
> Richard
I once made a password form for us to write down root, Administrator and
what-have-you passwords on. It contained such notices as:
DO NOT FILL OUT ON-LINE
And my favorite:
"This paper gives YOU the right to do with these passwords whatever you
will. If this paper, filled out, is ever let out of the hands of IT
personnel, then we deserve whatever is done with it."
Needless to say, this did not meet with Management approval. But it
amused me.
--
Please do not read this signature.
Zebee Johnstone
Richard Bos <ral...@xs4all.nl> wrote:
>
> Which is why every sysadmin should have a writing hand in which those
> are different, and from o; and in which a and u are clearly distinct
> from one another and from o as well, as are iIl!. Perversely, written-
Long time ago I worked in a punch card shop. We wrote our code onto
forms and the nice ladies in the keypunch pool would punch the cards.
They very quickly taught all new hires to write clearly and to follow
the standard to differentiate 0 and O, 6 and b, 2 and 7 and l and I,
and so on.
Because the moment they weren't sure what a character was, the job
went in the shotdown bin and you lost a day or so.
I already knew about zero and capital-O, but what I didn't know was
that there were two standards - one crossed the zero and one crossed the
O.
Needless to say I'd learned the one they didn't use....
Zebee
David Gallatin
> David Gallatin <dgal...@mendicant.com> writes:
>>If I have to have one more discussion on why passwords more complex than
>>'first initial-lastname' or 'petname1' are important,
>
> Amusing how it's always the digit '1', isn't it? Perhaps that's as high as
> they can count.
Oh, they can count higher. Or at least they know someone who can. Every
time their password expires, you can count on that end integer to
increment by one. I knew one manager whose password, after several years,
was 'jesus27'.
>
> Also, when they add non-alphanumeric characters, it's always an exclamation
> point, always as the final character.
And if they have to have both a non-alphanumeric character and a number,
it's usually someword1!
Zebee Johnstone
David Gallatin <dgal...@mendicant.com> wrote:
>
> And if they have to have both a non-alphanumeric character and a number,
> it's usually someword1!
Just shows the uselessness of "must have" in passwords.
I remember when the US Feds said they were going to increase password
security by having a standard for passwords requiring (I think)
capitals and numbers and the bod who wrote crack saying "great,
they've just narrowed my search space".
Zebee
Dave Vandervies
I once had an automated password strength checking system reject a
password that I had created with a pair of 8-sided dice and a lookup
table containing upper and lower case letters, decimal digits, and two
punctuation symbols. Something about a run of alphabetic characters
being too long.
I was Not Impressed. If the next one had been rejected as well, I would
have gone to the people who decreed the policy with a complaint along
the lines of "I give up, what IS the password I'm allowed to use?".
dave
--
Dave Vandervies dj3v...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca
Because we're morally and physically superior to other people. When the
great energy crunch comes, we'll be the only people who can get around and
people will look to us for leadership. --Andy Gee in rec.bicycles.misc
Blinkin the Misanthropic IT Gremlin
> While pretending to be roadkill on the InfoBahn, <use...@haderach.net> scrawled:
>> I'm likewise looking forward to working someplace where "Get stuff done"
>> is the driving goal, as opposed to "Don't rock the boat."
>
> *muahahahahhahaha* Such innocence.
>
>> days...
>
> I'm sorry, the Iron Bar has been worn down, in fact, too many of
> them were worn down, creating the Gritty Lubricant of Reality.
>
> -Tai
Is this available in office supply stores then, or must I wait for the
musty smell coming from behind a beancounter's door before I can obtain
some for myself?
--
Blinkin the Misanthropic IT Gremlin
Servant of the Sheep World by Day
Dark Master of the Mole People by Eventide
Chris Suslowicz
dj3v...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca (Dave Vandervies) wrote:
>I once had an automated password strength checking system reject a
>password that I had created with a pair of 8-sided dice and a lookup
>table containing upper and lower case letters, decimal digits, and two
>punctuation symbols. Something about a run of alphabetic characters
>being too long.
MikeA, avert your eyes, please!
Or the recent upgrade to PN-NPS2 on one of the dinosaurs that introduced
a default "*NO* repeated letters permitted" rule.
>I was Not Impressed. If the next one had been rejected as well, I would
>have gone to the people who decreed the policy with a complaint along
>the lines of "I give up, what IS the password I'm allowed to use?".
If you make the password rules /too/ Byzantine, people just start writing
the passwords on post-it notes.
I used to write my passwords down: 9 pairs of 6-sided dice throws. First
pair picks the lookup table. (Generated by sequentially filling a 6x6 grid
with the ($Security System permitted) characters picked out of a hat. I
think I omitted $CurrencySymbol to avoid codepage problems, and there
were always a couple of characters left in the hat after filling the table.
6 pages, 6 tables per page, generated during a long train journey when
I ran out of books to read.) Remaining 8 pairs index into that table.
Final sanity check (shuffle letters if it hits certain rules) and then
write the number down before changing the password.
There's /a/ system which requires a physical dongle, an RSA token, *AND*
a 14-digit password (mixed case, alphanumeric + specials) at Ork which I
thankfully don't have to use....
Chris.
--
Service with a capital "Bugger Off".
Graham Reed
> "If I told you I'd have to shoot you."
Damn. Now I have to change my SSH passkey.
--
"Graham was right."
-- "Smoke and Mirrors" by Tanya Huff
Seth
Zebee Johnstone <zeb...@gmail.com> wrote:
>I already knew about zero and capital-O, but what I didn't know was
>that there were two standards - one crossed the zero and one crossed the
>O.
I thought it was slash the zero (diagonally) or cross the Oh
(horizontally).
Seth
Maarten Wiltink
news:favc9o$if0$1...@rumours.uwaterloo.ca...
[...]
> I once had an automated password strength checking system reject a
> password that I had created with a pair of 8-sided dice and a lookup
> table containing upper and lower case letters, decimal digits, and two
> punctuation symbols. Something about a run of alphabetic characters
> being too long.
Oh, I'm not the only idiot who does that? What punctuation did you use?
I settled on #!.
I fired off an email to one of my ISPs who rejected such a password, too.
'I *know* there's 48 bits of entropy in my passwords, and no, I don''t
really expect you to change the rules on my account.'
(They wanted line noise in every password, which is far from guaranteed
with that lookup table. So now I roll on the table seven times and add
a random punctuation mark (Shift 1-8) in a random position (as the 1-8th
character) with the eight double roll. Since that may generate # and ! as
well, I think some entropy is lost, but I'm not losing sleep over it.)
Tebrgwrf,
Maarten Wiltink
Zebee Johnstone
I suspect that the difference between across and diagonally isn't
mportant, it is "circle" and "circle with thingy".
So here's me thinking "zero is circle with thingy" and them thinking
"Oh is circle with thingy" and my jobs making it through the punchcard
pool and onto the machines and ending up in the shotdown bin anyway.
Until someone pointed out the problem. I boggled and learned to make
Oh the circle with thingy.
Once I left there, I went back to the usual way to do it.
Zebee
Joe Zeff
>So here's me thinking "zero is circle with thingy" and them thinking
>"Oh is circle with thingy" and my jobs making it through the punchcard
>pool and onto the machines and ending up in the shotdown bin anyway.
Back when I was in school, we had coding forms for the punched cards.
At the bottom was a place for you to put a 0 an O, a 1, a 7, a 2 and a
Z, all labled. Yes, we punched our own cards, but that's how the
forms were laid out, Just In Case.
--
Joe Zeff
The Guy With the Sideburns
If I want a puzzle, I'll buy one in a box.
http://www.lasfs.info http://www.zeff.us
Mike Andrews
Chris Suslowicz <chris...@suslowicz.org> wrote in
<C2F9060D...@192.168.1.23>:
> In article <favc9o$if0$1...@rumours.uwaterloo.ca>,
> dj3v...@csclub.uwaterloo.ca (Dave Vandervies) wrote:
>>I once had an automated password strength checking system reject a
>>password that I had created with a pair of 8-sided dice and a lookup
>>table containing upper and lower case letters, decimal digits, and two
>>punctuation symbols. Something about a run of alphabetic characters
>>being too long.
> MikeA, avert your eyes, please!
> Or the recent upgrade to PN-NPS2 on one of the dinosaurs that introduced
> a default "*NO* repeated letters permitted" rule.
I had to change my LoseDows password today: it had been too long since
I rebooted, something I never would have expected from LoseDows. Most
of the time it fails before I reboot it intentionally. At any rate, I
had to change the password, and the ruleset was kind enough to close
off a *lot* of the possible PW space.
>>I was Not Impressed. If the next one had been rejected as well, I would
>>have gone to the people who decreed the policy with a complaint along
>>the lines of "I give up, what IS the password I'm allowed to use?".
> If you make the password rules /too/ Byzantine, people just start writing
> the passwords on post-it notes.
Yes. After all, if Mal can get to the hard drive, then the password is
pretty much academic on a non-encrypted drive, innit?
> I used to write my passwords down: 9 pairs of 6-sided dice throws. First
> pair picks the lookup table. (Generated by sequentially filling a 6x6 grid
> with the ($Security System permitted) characters picked out of a hat. I
> think I omitted $CurrencySymbol to avoid codepage problems, and there
> were always a couple of characters left in the hat after filling the table.
> 6 pages, 6 tables per page, generated during a long train journey when
> I ran out of books to read.) Remaining 8 pairs index into that table.
> Final sanity check (shuffle letters if it hits certain rules) and then
> write the number down before changing the password.
A bit much. I use something mildly like S-key on some systems, and
cart the paper around with me. And the flash drive. And the copy on
the card in my Palm. And ... .
> There's /a/ system which requires a physical dongle, an RSA token, *AND*
> a 14-digit password (mixed case, alphanumeric + specials) at Ork which I
> thankfully don't have to use....
True narapoia.
--
I had NANAE and ASR mixed up - I thought NANAE was the place
where Useful Information is not allowed. I've not seen much of it
here lately. -- Steve Sobol, in NANAE
Peter H. Coffin
You know that, the bod knows that, I know that. Everyone else here knows
that. Do you think IT managlement knows that? It's a classic case of "It
would be a good idea to..." becoming a requirement without reason or
responsibility.
--
6. I will not gloat over my enemies' predicament before killing them.
--Peter Anspach's list of things to do as an Evil Overlord
Blinkin the Misanthropic IT Gremlin
dark pit:
Where were you that "o" was interpreted as a circle with line? The only
context I've ever seen any circular character with a line through, in,
around, what have you, was in maths (ie the nullset character is 0 with
a slash mark). If someone told me that they interpreted the nullset
character as the letter "o", I think I'd boggle too.
Peter H. Coffin
> There's /a/ system which requires a physical dongle, an RSA token, *AND*
> a 14-digit password (mixed case, alphanumeric + specials) at Ork which I
> thankfully don't have to use....
*mutter* When I *am* Evil Overlord, any system that has any sort of
password strenght-checking will be required to generate an acceptable
password randomly for every failed attempt.
Zebee Johnstone
Blinkin the Misanthropic IT Gremlin <aybl...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Where were you that "o" was interpreted as a circle with line? The only
GSI - Geophysical Services International. Owned by TI, although why
an electronics company wanted a geophysical survey company was never
adequately explained.
Someone called the slash difference "HP vs IBM" but as I've never seen
a slashed Oh anywhere but there I doubt that's so.
And it's "circle with a line interpreted as capital O"
Zebee
Max
> On Mon, 27 Aug 2007 22:51:57 +0100, Chris Suslowicz wrote:
>> There's /a/ system which requires a physical dongle, an RSA token, *AND*
>> a 14-digit password (mixed case, alphanumeric + specials) at Ork which I
>> thankfully don't have to use....
>
> *mutter* When I *am* Evil Overlord, any system that has any sort of
> password strenght-checking will be required to generate an acceptable
> password randomly for every failed attempt.
>
Of course, since you would be an *evil* overlord, that password would then
be disallowed since it had been presented as an example.
Max
--
__|__
*---o---(_)---o---*
Chris Suslowicz
"Mike Andrews" <mi...@mikea.ath.cx> wrote:
>On Mon, 27 Aug 2007 22:51:57 +0100,
> Chris Suslowicz <chris...@suslowicz.org> wrote in
> <C2F9060D...@192.168.1.23>:
>> There's /a/ system which requires a physical dongle, an RSA token, *AND*
>> a 14-digit password (mixed case, alphanumeric + specials) at Ork which I
>> thankfully don't have to use....
>
>True narapoia.
S'gummint, they want it done _their_ way, and think it's more secure having
passwords that look like they were lifted from the necronomicon.
Chris.
--
HAZEL'S LANGUAGE LESSONS: GREEK. _rafanizou_, to thrust a radish up the
fundament; a punishment for adulterers in Athens. [VC, 1985] (Ansible)
Chris Suslowicz
se...@panix.com (Seth) wrote:
Diagonal slash through the zero (or a dot in the centre) is the usual one.
Horizontal bar above the Oh (also the esS) gets used a lot.
George O. Struble used the diagonal slash through the Oh in his 360 Assembler
book, which was a fscking nusiance.
Graham Reed
> Where were you that "o" was interpreted as a circle with line?
You might find it around older accountants. My father, who easily
qualifies for that, grumped about the Commodore 64 having the zero
slashed instead of the uppercase oh.
Blinkin the Misanthropic IT Gremlin
And the criterion for a "good" password would get progressively more
arcane and draconian.
--
Blinkin the Misanthropic IT Gremlin
Brian Kantor
>>that there were two standards - one crossed the zero and one crossed the O.
>I thought it was slash the zero (diagonally) or cross the Oh (horizontally).
Our BCL keypunches (and one of the printer chains) used to print
the letter O as a small circle raised from the baseline and a
slantbar across the whole character cell. I think the microfilm
Charactron had that available too.
I've seen the O as round and the zero as diamond-shaped. Some
dot-matrix printers had an option to either put a dot into the
center of the zero, or a slant across it, or neither.
The nice thing about standards is that there are so many to choose from.
Oy.
- Brian
Brian Kantor
restrictions.
- Brian
Brian Kantor
>that. Do you think IT managlement knows that? It's a classic case of "It
>would be a good idea to..." becoming a requirement without reason or
>responsibility.
I submit, without further comment, http://adminrecords.ucsd.edu/ppm/updates/135-3.PDF
NB: the termination of the named responsible organization was announced the week
before the standard was effective.
- Brian
Steve VanDevender
> On 2007-08-26, Steve VanDevender <ste...@hexadecimal.uoregon.edu> wrote:
>> [Tale of great pain snipped]
>> I have more energy I plan to rant about this at greater length. Damn I
>> want to slap those people around.
>
> I thought there's already a daemon in charge with that. They call it
> slapd.
If the people who wrote the BitchX IRC client/botmaster/whatever-it-was
were to do their own implementation of an YQNC server called bitchslapd,
I would like totally run it.
So today, in a bit of frustration, I wrote an email message that honked
off our YQNC project manager. I didn't name names, I didn't lay blame,
I just laid out what I saw as some major problems that had caused and
are still causing a lot of pain for our users, not to mention our
support folks and us sysadmins. Maybe it was the catalog of systematic
errors in the YQNC database which weren't discovered until we went live,
because despite repeated suggestions to do the kind of comparison that
would have revealed these problems, we had neither the access nor
cooperation from the implementors to do the comparison before the
cutover date.
431 accounts loaded with invalid home directory fields ("/home1/"
instead of, say, "/home16/luser").
467 accounts loaded with empty shell fields. This in particular caused
problems with POP/IMAP logins as, for some reason, our server checks
that. Even if that wasn't a problem, for lots of hysterical raisins we
do certain things by having some web front ends ssh in to a shell host
on behalf of that user to change preference files and such. Better
still, most of these were retirees who have lots of spare time to hound
our user support folks about their account problems.
851 accounts which had one shell originally and now have a different
(but at least valid) shell in YQNC. One of those belongs to a
notoriously cranky math professor whose latest reason to be pissed off
at us is that his handcrafted shell environment went missing, so they
invoked their own autoLART on that one. Flame on!
36 accounts, several of them role accounts for various administrative
purposes, which should be managed by YQNC but are still temporarily
being kept in the passwd file because for unexplained reasons it's
somehow really tough to make them appear in YQNC.
It took them nearly two hours on Saturday to fix the invalid home
directories. It took them a similar amount of time on Sunday to fix the
invalid shell fields. They still haven't fixed the shell discrepancies.
This is kind of what annoys me; even if it is some kind of pain for them
to do a bulk data update (and I am beginning to fear there is no such
thing, just someone grinding away in front of a terminal), we are going
to need to do more of this sort of thing sooner or later, and it needs
to be possible to do it efficiently, and ideally with the kind of
validation which again, for reasons they seem unwilling to explain, is
somehow really tough to do or unnecessary because the data is obviously
so high-quality. (I issued three shell command lines to perform the
comparisons, with the biggest time sink being the wait for YQNC to do a
mass dump of its account data.)
The response I got was . . . amusing. I was accused of having an
"insulting tone". I may have been very direct in expressing the
problems, but I didn't make any personal attacks or try to pin the blame
on anyone. The litany of large numbers probably made the magnitude of
their fsckup a little too explicit. I even offered (for at least the
second time) my own labor in whatever form they desired to try to help
fix the remaining account discrepancies. I was told I should have
attended more of the tedious meetings where they "planned" this fiasco,
as if they wouldn't have blown off my concerns months ago just as
directly as they blew them off now. Oh, and of course "any big project
like this is going to have problems". Yeah, sure, but what I hate is
plunging ahead into a project that has known problems and then turns out
to have even worse problems that could have been solved ahead of time
except we basically weren't allowed to try to find them ahead of time.
It was bad enough struggling with the software that sucked, like the
Non-Stable Crap Daemon which is great in concept except that it dies
like mayflies in mating season and then causes a whole lot of stuff to
fail in its absence.
I think there may really be a situation here where she considers the
project 96.3% successful, while I consider the project as having created
1749 significant problems that could have been avoided and therefore
should never have happened.
--
Steve VanDevender "I ride the big iron" http://hexadecimal.uoregon.edu/
ste...@hexadecimal.uoregon.edu PGP keyprint 4AD7AF61F0B9DE87 522902969C0A7EE8
Little things break, circuitry burns / Time flies while my little world turns
Every day comes, every day goes / 100 years and nobody shows -- Happy Rhodes
Jasper Janssen
>In article <fb2akl$2ng7$1...@ihnp4.ucsd.edu>,
>Brian Kantor <br...@karoshi.ucsd.edu> wrote:
>> >You know that, the bod knows that, I know that. Everyone else here knows
>> >that. Do you think IT managlement knows that? It's a classic case of "It
>> >would be a good idea to..." becoming a requirement without reason or
>> >responsibility.
>>
>> I submit, without further comment,
>> http://adminrecords.ucsd.edu/ppm/updates/135-3.PDF
>
>I just giggled and giggled and giggled at Appendix C.
>
>Is there any kind of file which you *can't* use to root Windows?
I note that .jpg isn't mentioned, although it has/had a rather
well-publicised hole. So the list isn't even complete.
Jasper
Dave
> MikeA, avert your eyes, please!
>
> Or the recent upgrade to PN-NPS2 on one of the dinosaurs that introduced
> a default "*NO* repeated letters permitted" rule.
EnigmaOS?
> If you make the password rules /too/ Byzantine, people just start writing
> the passwords on post-it notes.
I'm getting increasingly worried, as my age increases and various bits
of me start to seize up, that I'm going to start forgetting passwords.
There are so many I need to remember, most of which need to resonably
strong, and most of which need to be different to the other reasonably
strong passwords, and most of which I really mustn't forget or write
down. It's getting toward the point where I've started to log onto
systems and services more frequently then I need to simply to ensure
that I can remember how to log onto the system or service for when I do
really need to.
Dave
--
millibrachiate tentacular coelenterates
Peter H. Coffin
> In article <fb2akl$2ng7$1...@ihnp4.ucsd.edu>,
> Brian Kantor <br...@karoshi.ucsd.edu> wrote:
>> >that. Do you think IT managlement knows that? It's a classic case of "It
>> >would be a good idea to..." becoming a requirement without reason or
>> >responsibility.
>>
>> I submit, without further comment,
>> http://adminrecords.ucsd.edu/ppm/updates/135-3.PDF
>
>
> Is there any kind of file which you *can't* use to root Windows?
.zip is bad, but .rar is okay. Noted.
Mike Andrews
Dave <jrz...@qfy.cvcrk.pbz> wrote in
<uir6y3...@qfy.cvcrk.pbz>:
> chris...@suslowicz.org (Chris Suslowicz) writes:
>> MikeA, avert your eyes, please!
>>
>> Or the recent upgrade to PN-NPS2 on one of the dinosaurs that introduced
>> a default "*NO* repeated letters permitted" rule.
> EnigmaOS?
More like PlayfairOS; Enigma just didn't map <foo> to <foo>, for any
character <foo> on the KB. The Playfair cipher doesn't like doubled
letters and requires that a null be inserted to break them up. I'm
trying to remember if any of the other "simple" tabular ciphers (e.g.,
four-square) have that restriction, and don't recall that they do.
Playfair is a special case because it only uses a 5x5 table.
Lots of beautiful effort went into devising and breaking the old
manual ciphers; shame they're close to obsolete in most cases.
>> If you make the password rules /too/ Byzantine, people just start writing
>> the passwords on post-it notes.
> I'm getting increasingly worried, as my age increases and various bits
> of me start to seize up, that I'm going to start forgetting passwords.
> There are so many I need to remember, most of which need to resonably
> strong, and most of which need to be different to the other reasonably
> strong passwords, and most of which I really mustn't forget or write
> down. It's getting toward the point where I've started to log onto
> systems and services more frequently then I need to simply to ensure
> that I can remember how to log onto the system or service for when I do
> really need to.
Yes, indeed. This is the spark for the various password-remembering
services on PDAs, PeeCees, &c.
--
"Go cut down the carcass of the Duke of Longmot. Cut through the
intestines that keep him hanging from the keep, then fling the
corpse into the moat. ... The man doesn't deserve another night
of royal hospitality." -- David Farland, _The Runelords_
Dave
> On Wed, 29 Aug 2007 12:31:56 GMT,
> Dave <jrz...@qfy.cvcrk.pbz> wrote in
> <uir6y3...@qfy.cvcrk.pbz>:
>
> > chris...@suslowicz.org (Chris Suslowicz) writes:
>
> >> MikeA, avert your eyes, please!
> >>
> >> Or the recent upgrade to PN-NPS2 on one of the dinosaurs that introduced
> >> a default "*NO* repeated letters permitted" rule.
>
> > EnigmaOS?
>
> More like PlayfairOS; Enigma just didn't map <foo> to <foo>, for any
> character <foo> on the KB.
Yes, I was getting forgetful - it also didn't map <foo> to <bar> twice
in a row, IIRC, which is what I was thinking of. The germans thought
that made it stronger. Whoops.
> Lots of beautiful effort went into devising and breaking the old
> manual ciphers; shame they're close to obsolete in most cases.
Indeed. PGP and the ilk may be 'pretty good', but wiggling a mouse
about to get a random key certainly isn't elegant.
[forgetting passwords]
> Yes, indeed. This is the spark for the various password-remembering
> services on PDAs, PeeCees, &c.
Which I really don't trust. If -that- gets broken then, hey, here's
_all_ my banking, purchasing and system passwords.
Mike Andrews
Dave <jrz...@qfy.cvcrk.pbz> wrote in
<uejhm2...@qfy.cvcrk.pbz>:
> "Mike Andrews" <mi...@mikea.ath.cx> writes:
>> On Wed, 29 Aug 2007 12:31:56 GMT,
>> Dave <jrz...@qfy.cvcrk.pbz> wrote in
>> <uir6y3...@qfy.cvcrk.pbz>:
>>
>> > chris...@suslowicz.org (Chris Suslowicz) writes:
>>
>> >> MikeA, avert your eyes, please!
>> >>
>> >> Or the recent upgrade to PN-NPS2 on one of the dinosaurs that introduced
>> >> a default "*NO* repeated letters permitted" rule.
>>
>> > EnigmaOS?
>>
>> More like PlayfairOS; Enigma just didn't map <foo> to <foo>, for any
>> character <foo> on the KB.
> Yes, I was getting forgetful - it also didn't map <foo> to <bar> twice
> in a row, IIRC, which is what I was thinking of. The germans thought
> that made it stronger. Whoops.
Cite? I don't recall that being part of the design, and don't see a way to
ensure it in a rotor machine.The output path is whatever the rotors
map to, and that's that. P(x->y) at steps N and N+1 would be about 1/N,
where N is the size of the charset. Not 1/(N^2), since you don't care about
the first input character, only about the second one.
My fave, though, for stupid restrictions that provided a wonderfully huge
opening wedge, is PURPLE: the designers divided the input space into
vowels and consonants, and mapped each set only into itself: V->V, C->C.
Even so, Bill Friedman spent a lot of time and skull-sweat doing the set
theory to turn that oopsie into pages of usable Romaji.
Interestingly enough, PURPLE probably was rather less secure than its
predecessors, CORAL et al., just because of that division.
Getting into the naval codes, the diplomatic codes, and some of the
diplomatic and mid-level military ciphers of HIJM's gummint apparently
took rather longer.
>> Lots of beautiful effort went into devising and breaking the old
>> manual ciphers; shame they're close to obsolete in most cases.
> Indeed. PGP and the ilk may be 'pretty good', but wiggling a mouse
> about to get a random key certainly isn't elegant.
> [forgetting passwords]
>> Yes, indeed. This is the spark for the various password-remembering
>> services on PDAs, PeeCees, &c.
>
> Which I really don't trust. If -that- gets broken then, hey, here's
> _all_ my banking, purchasing and system passwords.
That's if you use exactly one. Use multiples, keep them synced up (not
an easy chore, either), keep them safe[1].
[1] Gandalf arrives at Number wossname Bagshot Row, rushes in, grabs
Frodo by the shoulders, asks if Frodo still has his firecall
envelope with the passwords and IDs for all the palantiri, checks
it most carefully for signs of intrusion attempts.
--
Chris King: We're sysadmins. Sanity happens to other people.
Graham Reed: We're sysadmins. _We_ happen to other people. What's sanity?
Mike Andrews
Mike Andrews <mi...@mikea.ath.cx> wrote in
<fb42js$5sn$1...@puck.litech.org>:
> Cite? I don't recall that being part of the design, and don't see a way to
> ensure it in a rotor machine.The output path is whatever the rotors
> map to, and that's that. P(x->y) at steps N and N+1 would be about 1/N,
> where N is the size of the charset. Not 1/(N^2), since you don't care about
> the first input character, only about the second one.
I HATE IT WHEN I DO THAT!
> Cite? I don't recall that being part of the design, and don't see a way to
> ensure it in a rotor machine.The output path is whatever the rotors
> map to, and that's that. P(x->y) at steps K and K+1 would be about 1/N,
> where N is the size of the charset. Not 1/(N^2), since you don't care about
> the first input character, only about the second one.
Damn!
--
Segovia on the power of the guitar to be heard in large halls:
My friend who is a philosopher was speaking to students in a great hall and
one said he could not hear. 'Very well,' said the philosopher, ''I will
speak lower.''
David Gallatin
> On Mon, 27 Aug 2007 22:51:57 +0100, Chris Suslowicz wrote:
>> There's /a/ system which requires a physical dongle, an RSA token, *AND*
>> a 14-digit password (mixed case, alphanumeric + specials) at Ork which I
>> thankfully don't have to use....
>
> *mutter* When I *am* Evil Overlord, any system that has any sort of
> password strenght-checking will be required to generate an acceptable
> password randomly for every failed attempt.
>
Which will then be recorded, so that when they try to use it as their
password on their next attempt, they will get an error stating that they
are not permitted to re-use former passwords.
David Gallatin
> "Mike Andrews" <mi...@mikea.ath.cx> writes:
> [forgetting passwords]
>> Yes, indeed. This is the spark for the various password-remembering
>> services on PDAs, PeeCees, &c.
>
> Which I really don't trust. If -that- gets broken then, hey, here's
> _all_ my banking, purchasing and system passwords.
>
And this brings us to the next inevitable phase. The multi-password
password-remembering service. When you attempt to log into it, it selects
one of your passwords at random, and demands it as the entry password.
PRS: What is your 'Bank of $Country' password?
User: That's what I want to know!
Since this would not only weaken the overall protection, in that someone
trying to break in would just need to know one of your passwords to get
the rest of them, but also make the entire purpose of the service
pointless, I expect to see advertisements for it Real Soon Now(tm).
Dave
> > Yes, I was getting forgetful - it also didn't map <foo> to <bar> twice
> > in a row, IIRC, which is what I was thinking of. The germans thought
> > that made it stronger. Whoops.
>
> Cite? I don't recall that being part of the design, and don't see a way to
> ensure it in a rotor machine.
Erm, having a single rotor turn between each letter guarrantees that you
wont get the same mapping two keypresses in a row.
> > [forgetting passwords]
> >> Yes, indeed. This is the spark for the various password-remembering
> >> services on PDAs, PeeCees, &c.
> >
> > Which I really don't trust. If -that- gets broken then, hey, here's
> > _all_ my banking, purchasing and system passwords.
>
> That's if you use exactly one. Use multiples, keep them synced up (not
> an easy chore, either), keep them safe[1].
And I'm back to having to remember lots of passwords. Again. Ack. Still,
maybe some I should look at getting a palm-thing with a thumbprint
scanner on it. I'm certainly not rich enough/important enough for
anyone to slice my thumb off.
Dave
> "Mike Andrews" <mi...@mikea.ath.cx> writes:
>
> > > Yes, I was getting forgetful - it also didn't map <foo> to <bar> twice
> > > in a row, IIRC, which is what I was thinking of. The germans thought
> > > that made it stronger. Whoops.
> >
> > Cite? I don't recall that being part of the design, and don't see a way to
> > ensure it in a rotor machine.
>
> Erm, having a single rotor turn between each letter guarrantees that you
> wont get the same mapping two keypresses in a row.
Sorry, I'm talking utter claptrap. I think I'll just go and bugger off
and dig out my copy of The Code Book, or something, and stop making a
pratt out of myself.
TimC
was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea:
> "Mike Andrews" <mi...@mikea.ath.cx> writes:
>> That's if you use exactly one. Use multiples, keep them synced up (not
>> an easy chore, either), keep them safe[1].
>
> And I'm back to having to remember lots of passwords. Again. Ack. Still,
> maybe some I should look at getting a palm-thing with a thumbprint
> scanner on it. I'm certainly not rich enough/important enough for
> anyone to slice my thumb off.
Caution: Do not taunt Mafia with other thumb.
--
TimC
"Warning: Do not look into laser with remaining eye" -- a physics experiment
"Press emergency laser shutdown button with remaining hand" -- J.D.Baldwin@ASR
Mike Andrews
Dave <jrz...@qfy.cvcrk.pbz> wrote in
<u4pii2...@qfy.cvcrk.pbz>:
> "Mike Andrews" <mi...@mikea.ath.cx> writes:
>> > Yes, I was getting forgetful - it also didn't map <foo> to <bar> twice
>> > in a row, IIRC, which is what I was thinking of. The germans thought
>> > that made it stronger. Whoops.
>>
>> Cite? I don't recall that being part of the design, and don't see a way to
>> ensure it in a rotor machine.
> Erm, having a single rotor turn between each letter guarrantees that you
> wont get the same mapping two keypresses in a row.
So who said that every rotor machine has exactly one rotor turn after
each keypress? Consider the case(s) in which 2 or more rotors, not
necessarily contiguous, turn. What if some rotors move 1 position,
while others move 2? Forward or backward? Just having the rotors turn
like the rings in an odometer is Not A Good Idea. One machine, SIGABA,
had the cipher rotor motion controlled by another set of rotors -- a
really snaky idea, and one which must have made debugging *fun*.
>> > [forgetting passwords]
>> >> Yes, indeed. This is the spark for the various password-remembering
>> >> services on PDAs, PeeCees, &c.
>> >
>> > Which I really don't trust. If -that- gets broken then, hey, here's
>> > _all_ my banking, purchasing and system passwords.
>>
>> That's if you use exactly one. Use multiples, keep them synced up (not
>> an easy chore, either), keep them safe[1].
> And I'm back to having to remember lots of passwords. Again. Ack. Still,
> maybe some I should look at getting a palm-thing with a thumbprint
> scanner on it. I'm certainly not rich enough/important enough for
> anyone to slice my thumb off.
Ever use any power tools? I do, and that's why I have Melody's prints
as well as mine in my lapdog's print reader, and she has mine as well
as hers in hers. Bandsaws are vicious, and Skilsaw-equivalents are no
less inimical and nasty.
Last ditch: envelopes in our safes (hers and mine) and in our safety
deposit box, with passwords. There also are envelopes in safes at ork,
and in $BOSS's desk.
--
[Once in a lifetime opportunity] is simply a veiled reference to the
staff contract termination procedure, which involves a sunny wall,
a single cigarette and some middling to average marksmen...
-- Dan Holdsworth
Blinkin the Misanthropic IT Gremlin
> On 2007-08-29, Peter H. Coffin (aka Bruce)
> was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea:
>>> In article <fb2akl$2ng7$1...@ihnp4.ucsd.edu>,
>>> Brian Kantor <br...@karoshi.ucsd.edu> wrote:
>>>>> You know that, the bod knows that, I know that. Everyone else here knows
>>>>> that. Do you think IT managlement knows that? It's a classic case of "It
>>>>> would be a good idea to..." becoming a requirement without reason or
>>>>> responsibility.
>>>> I submit, without further comment,
>>>> http://adminrecords.ucsd.edu/ppm/updates/135-3.PDF
>>> I just giggled and giggled and giggled at Appendix C.
>>>
>>> Is there any kind of file which you *can't* use to root Windows?
>> .zip is bad, but .rar is okay. Noted.
>
>
> Actually, why don't they just say *? Since any file could be an
> archive, could be unpacked onto a samba share, and then used to root
> the 'duhs system?
>
Windows is like a level of Fhcre Znevb Oebguref where all the mushrooms
are actually death shrooms... whether they bear the markings or not.
E.P.Sporgersi
>
> And if they have to have both a non-alphanumeric character and a number,
> it's usually someword1!
Our Friends and Customers here have had the rules well and truly drummed
into them i.e. you no choose password with number in, you no get your
work done. We have machines to do that for us. It occasionally falls to
me to explain that our Unix boxen stop caring after the eighth
character. So that as far as the system cares, "someword1" does not
have a number in. START with anumber, then a word. Hysterical Raisins
indeed.
Cheers,
E.P. Sporgersi.
--
Meh.
E.P.Sporgersi
>
> Which will then be recorded, so that when they try to use it as their
> password on their next attempt, they will get an error stating that they
> are not permitted to re-use former passwords.
Evil overlords use AIX?
--
Meh.
Mike Andrews
E.P.Sporgersi <fle...@xs4all.nl> wrote in
<46d5b8fc$0$233$e4fe...@news.xs4all.nl>:
> Evil overlords use AIX?
It ain't just Aches that does that.
--
the only potential lusers will ever have is when they're connected to
an electron source of serious capability.
-- // Rik Steenwinkel
Tai
> Plaintext maybe.
>
> Although I found that the mail gateways we install at customer
> locations have .txt on the restricted list by default.
>
> I wouldn't be suprised if an exploit was found to root Windows using
> nothing but real, 7-bit clean, ASCII.
begin a rooting we will go
Sure there is. I've bitched about it before, here even.
Outhouse s3xpr3ss used to interpret this post as uuencoded. As long as
one line starts with the string "^begin ?", outhouse will interprete it
as uuencoded, and try to decode it, and then inline the fscking result.
IE, uuencode some nasty javashit, leave off the "^end" line, and have
lots of fun.
-Tai
--
http://www.vcnet.com/bms/features/serendipities.html
http://www.kenthamilton.net/humor/humor.html
http://www.despair.com/demotivators/cluelessness.html
"What we have done with PCs so far is not natural" - Craig Mundie, CTO Microsoft
E.P.Sporgersi
> I just giggled and giggled and giggled at Appendix C.
>
> Is there any kind of file which you *can't* use to root Windows?
Amazing that after all these years, Windows still executes .com files.
--
Meh.
TimC
was almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea:
Thanks! What's your gateway machine's name? You've just narrowed the
search space by <argh fugget, too late in the morning>
--
TimC
Look - a diversion! It's shiny! -- Daniel Stone
E.P.Sporgersi
>
> Thanks! What's your gateway machine's name? You've just narrowed the
> search space by <argh fugget, too late in the morning>
The Great Unwashed don't get to type in passwords to anything Internet
facing. I'm not so paranoid that I use dice to generate my passwords,
but I tend to use initials of scraps of poetry, occasionally l33t-ified.
I would be very happy indeed if the folks under my care did nothing
worse than consistently start their passwords with a number.
"Gurl pna'g qb nalguvat - gurl qba'g trg n furyy"
Yeah right.
--
Meh.
Stuart Lamble
Bass-ackwards "compatibility", remember?
It's even smart enough to recognise a .exe that's been renamed to .com
and treat it in the "right" way. (Right being defined by Redmond, that
is. *My* right way would be to dump the offending file straight into the
bit bucket.)
--
My Usenet From: address now expires after two weeks. If you email me, and
the mail bounces, try changing the bit before the "@" to "usenet".
David Cameron Staples
>
> Caution: Do not taunt Mafia with other thumb.
>
I do bite my thumb sir.
But do you bite your thumb *at* *me*, sir?
--
David Cameron Staples | staples AT cs DOT mu DOT oz DOT au
Melbourne University | Computer Science | Technical Services
It was an indescribably beautiful thing, with the perfection of line and form
that only something designed to be functional can have, lean and graceful and
infinitely menacing, like a man-eating swan.
-- Tom Holt, 'Who's afraid of Beowulf?'
Alexander Schreiber
Forget those. So far, fingerprint scanners can be defeated far too
easily. No need to slice off the thumb, just pay for a round of beer that
includes your victim, carefully collect his glass afterwards (which you
ensured was pretty clean of fingerprints before he touched it) and you're
almost done.
The severing-of-key-digits approach is only a good idead if you need it
right now and don't care about the side effects.
Regards,
Alex.
--
"Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and
looks like work." -- Thomas A. Edison
Zebee Johnstone
Alexander Schreiber <a...@usenet.thangorodrim.de> wrote:
>
> Forget those. So far, fingerprint scanners can be defeated far too
> easily. No need to slice off the thumb, just pay for a round of beer that
> includes your victim, carefully collect his glass afterwards (which you
> ensured was pretty clean of fingerprints before he touched it) and you're
> almost done.
>
Boils down to "how much does someone care".
I think for most folks the answer would be "not enough". For those
whose passwords mean someone can get lotsa money or fake
expensive/hard-to-fake IDs or are in some other way valuable, maybe.
Zebee
Steve VanDevender
in what I must hope is only a temporary moment of mindlessness, wrote:
> > We can discuss this more when we get to the point of deciding how to
> > resolve the person accounts whose shell was changed.
I wrote:
> I think the simple and correct thing to do for person accounts whose
> shell was changed is to change it back to what they originally had.
What I didn't write, but am thinking:
We don't have to discuss anything, you GODDAMN IDIOT. YOU DON'T HAVE TO
DECIDE ANYTHING. YOU HAVE TO FIX THE THING YOU FUCKED UP. You don't
have to THINK. You have to do the FUCKING WORK TO UNDO YOUR OWN
MISTAKE.
GodDAMN it. I can look at their rotting LDAP database and see that they
can populate it with shells that aren't "/bin/bash". They have no
fucking excuse for having changed these people's shells, shells that
those people customized to suit their own purposes and therefore clearly
wanted to keep using. They are just being lazy morons and I want to
LART the crap out of them.
--
Steve VanDevender "I ride the big iron" http://hexadecimal.uoregon.edu/
ste...@hexadecimal.uoregon.edu PGP keyprint 4AD7AF61F0B9DE87 522902969C0A7EE8
Little things break, circuitry burns / Time flies while my little world turns
Every day comes, every day goes / 100 years and nobody shows -- Happy Rhodes
Robert Uhl
>
>> The response I got was . . . amusing. I was accused of having an
>> "insulting tone". I may have been very direct in expressing the
>> problems, but I didn't make any personal attacks or try to pin the
>> blame
>
> Yes, being direct is an "insulting tone". Sometimes I wonder why
> circumlocution == politeness.
One theory is that this is due to the softening of American business
culture: where once it was very direct and competitive, now it is more
indirect and co-operative. Not having been working 40 years ago (nor
even a glint in my father's eye), I wouldn't know, but perhaps some of
our Elder BOFHs would be able to tell how things have changed over the
decades.
For my part, I think it'd be just peachy to cut out the approximately 14
trillion layers of middle management, project managers, planning
meetings, co-operative joint decision councils that neither co-operate,
nor produce decisions, nor even counsel (they do manage to jointly do
nothing--one of four ain't bad these days) &c. and just actually get
some work done. Revolutionary thought, I know.
--
The trouble with things that extend your lifespan is that they happen at
wrong end. I'd hate to be wearing Depends at 85 and thinking 'I gave up
booze and cigarettes for three more years of this.' --Anonymous
Robert Uhl
>
> Lots of beautiful effort went into devising and breaking the old
> manual ciphers; shame they're close to obsolete in most cases.
Are there any which _aren't_ obsolete?
I agree about their beauty, though. When I was a boy I'd a notebook
that I'd fill with all sorts of cyphers, codes & alphabets. I'd have
instructions, examples, graphs all neatly filled out in mechanical
pencil.
If only I'd spent some of that effort on chasing girls. But then, it's
much easier to understand a polysubstitution cypher than a female.
--
I believe that many who find that nothing happens when they sit down, or
kneel down, to a book of devotion, would find that the heart sings
unbidden while they are working their way through a tough bit of
theology with a pipe in their teeth and a pencil in their hand. --C.S. Lewis
Bogdan Iamandei
> "Mike Andrews" <mi...@mikea.ath.cx> writes:
>>
>> Lots of beautiful effort went into devising and breaking the old
>> manual ciphers; shame they're close to obsolete in most cases.
>
> Are there any which _aren't_ obsolete?
>
> I agree about their beauty, though. When I was a boy I'd a notebook
> that I'd fill with all sorts of cyphers, codes & alphabets. I'd have
> instructions, examples, graphs all neatly filled out in mechanical
> pencil.
>
> If only I'd spent some of that effort on chasing girls. But then, it's
> much easier to understand a polysubstitution cypher than a female.
And herein lies the proof that intelligence is not necessary an
reproductive avantage, which explains why the dumb are so numerous.
Sad... trully sad.
Ino!~
--
I have seen things you people wouldn't believe. Attack ships on fire
off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark
near the Tannhauser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time,
like tears in rain. Time to die.
Brian Kantor
>So the list isn't even complete.
Nor does it match what we're actually scanning for in our
inbound mail swervers.
- Brian
Brian Kantor
>One of the cow orkers involved with our "Identity Manglement" project,
You are me.
My new boss wants to move all identity management over to the Active
Directory system, made available by LDAP, and while she's at it:
Replace all the running FreeBSD systems with Red Hat servers on new Dell
hardware.
And replace the email system with Exchange.
And move authentication to AD via Shibboleth, replacing our Kerberos
server.
And switch all DB storage from Mysql to DB2.
And move all the storage from onboard disk to the IBM SAN device.
And have it all in production by February.
My psychiatrist wants to know if I'm having suicidal thoughts.
My dentist wants to know why I'm grinding my teeth so much.
HR lost my retirement papers. Again.
My cat has terminal kidney failure.
You know, this all sounds much more palatable since I'm loaded up on
Vicodin waiting for another kidney stone to pass.
It's a god damn good thing for everyone involved that I'm a pacifist
who doesn't own firearms.
- Brian
Brian Kantor
>For my part, I think it'd be just peachy to cut out the approximately 14
>trillion layers of middle management
If all someone does is hold meetings, they are a fucking waste of skin.
- Brian
Maarten Wiltink
news:86ps161...@gareth.avalon.lan...
> dagb...@LART.ca (Dave Brown) writes:
>> Is there any kind of file which you *can't* use to root Windows?
>
> Plaintext maybe.
[...]
> I wouldn't be suprised if an exploit was found to root Windows using
> nothing but real, 7-bit clean, ASCII.
I have this book at home... One chapter describes techniques for
writing i386 machine code that only uses byte values 32-126.
Tebrgwrf,
Maarten Wiltink
Maarten Wiltink
news:fb5usd$hv7$1...@ihnp4.ucsd.edu...
<lots of bad luck>
All in a day's work.
> My cat has terminal kidney failure.
Pet her for me once while you still can.
Now I want to go home and lie in the garden doing nothing with
three cats in my lap. It'll have to wait 'till half past five.
Tebrgwrf,
Maarten Wiltink
Phil Launchbury
> "Brian Kantor" <br...@karoshi.ucsd.edu> wrote in message
> news:fb5usd$hv7$1...@ihnp4.ucsd.edu...
>
>
> Pet her for me once while you still can.
We lost our two 18-year olds earlier this year (brother and sister
within two weeks of each other) - one to acute kidney failure and the
other to complications arising from long-standing thyroid problems
(eventually it was a heart attack that she died from - on the bed in my
wifes arms).
Now we suffer from lack of sleep from the 6 month old juvenile and the
3-month old kitten deciding to play at 3am. But it's worth it. Not that
our remaining older cat (17 years old) thinks so - she is deeply
unamused but quite happy with all the extra attention that we give her.
Phil.
--
Phil Launchbury, IT PHB
'I'm training the bats that live in my cube
to juggle mushrooms'
Mike Andrews
Robert Uhl <eadm...@nospamgmail.com> wrote in
<m31wdl6...@latakia.dyndns.org>:
> "Mike Andrews" <mi...@mikea.ath.cx> writes:
>>
>> Lots of beautiful effort went into devising and breaking the old
>> manual ciphers; shame they're close to obsolete in most cases.
> Are there any which _aren't_ obsolete?
The Soviet straddling checkerboards (google on "cipher snegopa") were
things of beauty, very secure for a long time, and broken only as the
result of an accident. I'd say that while they may be technically
obsolete, so is a rock as a weapon, and rocks still work for hitting
people.
> I agree about their beauty, though. When I was a boy I'd a notebook
> that I'd fill with all sorts of cyphers, codes & alphabets. I'd have
> instructions, examples, graphs all neatly filled out in mechanical
> pencil.
> If only I'd spent some of that effort on chasing girls. But then, it's
> much easier to understand a polysubstitution cypher than a female.
You just don't have enough dimensions in your Vigenere tableaus.
--
Spamming because of serious financial problems is like
yodeling because your cat destroys your furniture.
-- Gary S. Callison, in nanae
he...@kharendaen.dyndns.org
> > dagb...@LART.ca (Dave Brown) writes:
> > I wouldn't be suprised if an exploit was found to root Windows using
> > nothing but real, 7-bit clean, ASCII.
>
> I have this book at home... One chapter describes techniques for
> writing i386 machine code that only uses byte values 32-126.
You mean like:
X5O!P%@AP[4\PZX54(P^)7CC)7}$EICAR-STANDARD-ANTIVIRUS-TEST-FILE!$H+H*
?
I had a uuencoded version of this as my (McQ-compliant) .sig for a
while. Oh the outrage. I got several who claimed that the "virus" I
sent infected their boxen and, variously, destroyed their theses,
businesses and lives.
Newbies like that are like crossword puzzles, and I treasure each and
every one.
Steve VanDevender
> My dentist wants to know why I'm grinding my teeth so much.
I'm having oral surgery tomorrow to extract some broken teeth (and a few
others that are basically nearby in the construction zone) as the first
step towards later getting dental implants to replace them. I don't
grind my teeth, I just have dentinogenesis imperfecta corresponding to
my osteogenesis imperfecta and some of my teeth have broken beyond the
ability of my dentist to repair by any less drastic means.
I find myself perversely almost looking forward to the oral surgery,
because while I will be having something painful done to me, at least
I'll get anesthesia and painkillers, which I don't get to help me deal
with the stupid cow-orkers.
--
Steve VanDevender "I ride the big iron" http://hexadecimal.uoregon.edu/
ste...@hexadecimal.uoregon.edu PGP keyprint 4AD7AF61F0B9DE87 522902969C0A7EE8
"bash awk grep perl sed df du, du-du du-du,
vi troff su fsck rm * halt LART LART LART!" -- the Swedish BOFH