Little known fact: A Stanford mainframe kept logs of the activities of the ‘wheels’ in a journal – the ‘journal of the wheels’. Young George Lucas, who briefly attended the university, found that journal, and became fascinated with the ‘Wheel Wars’. He later drafted a document that he called ‘Journal of the Whills’, based largely on what he read on those logs; this is the draft that later became ‘Whill Wars’, and ultimately, of course, ‘Star Wars’.
I have no idea if this is true, but I’d be impressed if you just made it up.
Thanks indeed; but I think I’d be more impressed if it were actually true.
(but yeah, the first draft of Star Wars was called ‘journal of the whills’.)
… So… Is it true or not?!
It’s true. You can trust me, I’m a doctor.
Not a doctor!
Shhh
FREMULON!
I’m a doctor not an escalator…
Wait wrong Star show.
In my town’s school classes during Covid lockdown were held in Microsoft Teams. But there was a severe lack of IT knowledge. In the beginning, for some reason all participants ended up with moderator rights, so kids kept kicking the teacher out of their lecture.
We had similar issues and they disabled kicking participants. However, they didn’t disable muting teachers for another week.
Reminds me of the “Op” wars on IRC. All users would be given @ status and the point was to kick everyone before you got kicked. Writing scripts for this was my first “taste” at programming.
The best part of working in a meat grinder startup were the Linux masters teaching you stuff like
cat /dev/random > /dev/pty23or
su _otheruser_ chsh -s /bin/falseWhat is /dev/pty23? From context, I assume another users terminal so it just spams garbage to their screen?
What OP said. But here’s a more detailed answer courtesy of GPT-4:
Adding
cat /dev/random > /dev/pty23to your.profilewould result in an interesting situation whenever you start a login shell.-
Behavior of the Command: The command
cat /dev/randomcontinuously reads random data from the/dev/randomdevice file, which generates an endless stream of random bytes. Redirecting this to/dev/pty23means it attempts to write this data to the pseudo-terminal device/dev/pty23. -
Impact on Shell Startup: When you add this to your
.profile, every time you start a login shell (like when you open a new terminal session), it will execute this command. Since/dev/randomproduces an endless stream of data, thecatcommand will not terminate on its own. This means your shell will be stuck executing this command, and you won’t get a prompt to enter new commands. -
Interactive Shell Issue: The shell remains technically interactive, but because the
catcommand doesn’t complete, you won’t get a chance to interact with it. The shell is effectively blocked by thecatcommand continuously running. -
Potential Problems: There’s a possibility that
/dev/pty23might not exist on your system, or you might not have the permission to write to it. In such cases, the command would fail, but it would still block the shell if it doesn’t exit properly. -
Fixing the Issue: To regain control of your shell, you might need to edit your
.profilefrom a different context where it doesn’t get executed, like using a non-login shell or booting into a recovery mode.
In summary, it’s a kind of a “prank” command that can render your login shell unusable until you remove it from your
.profile. It’s an example of how powerful shell startup scripts can be, and also a reminder to be cautious about what gets added to them!-
cat /dev/random > /dev/pty23
Imagine someone adding this to your .profile
Reminds me of the test server shenanigans I had at an old job versus a colleague. All in fun. Nothing in production.
One was the faux Bash shell that kind of worked OK until you pushed it or tried to do anything fancy. It was the default shell for the user called “root”, but that wasn’t the UID 0 user. It had been, but I renamed it. Then created a new “root” with a different UID. Of course, the faux shell would tell “root” that it was UID 0.
The other was the simple background loop that would detect any rival admin sessions and SIGHUP their shell process. First user on the box to run that pretty much had free reign, and everyone else was logged off instantly.
In my freshman year of computer science our main computer lab was filled with Sage IV machines. Basically a Motorola 68k series with 4 or 5 serial terminals. Most people were writing Pascal code or using a simple word processor. But god forbid you were on there with someone taking assembly language. Because they could write really stupid code with super tight loops that never allowed any other code to run, and the only thing you could do was reboot. So if you hadn’t saved your code you were fucked.
So I never purposely wrote really bad code that would overwrite unprotected shared memory with random quotes from Marvin from HHGTG to mess with other people. I would never do that. That would have been unethical and shit… 🤔
I did learn a lot of basic hardware and operating systems though so there’s that.
I remember back in college we would abuse the wall command on our shared Linux server so much that IT had to disable it
got a similar situation in MUDs, someone finds a way to
frobeveryone else up towizardlevel and the whole round of the game just becomes a mess ofshoutsWhy declare a war over it? Just
sudo sed -i 's/%wheel/$(whoami)/' /etc/sudoersor smth like that$ usermod -G wheel lntli think that’s right
Need to throw a
-ain there otherwise wheel will be your only extra group.
