Ambush! - The Online Geek Community

"I'm a Doctor, not a (your choice)!"
Dr. McKoy on Star Trek

Mess Around With The ZWarrior and you'll get burned.  :lol:lol:lol

You ever have one of those days where nothing seems to go right and the users just aren't calling?  Well, I had one about three years ago, and now I'll share it with you.  You see, to understand the mind of a BOFH, you must become a BOFH.

It all started with showing up for work as a brand spanking new shift supervisor at 7:00 am and being told that I was going to work the evening and mid shift as well.  Talk about your mind numbing experiences.  That only slightly altered my outlook on the day, it was going to be a good day wasn't it?  I had the power, I had root to over 3000 systems and I controlled the routers and switches for the entire network.  Nothing could happen unless I knew about it, thanks mostly to my brand new 50" plasma display on the wall running HP Openview.  HA!:o  Looking back on it now, I realize I must have been smoking crack in my sleep the night before.

Nothing happened all day.   The helldesk maybe took ten calls all day, none of which disturbed my naps.  Shift change came and went.  Still nothing.  And then the next shift change came.  My day had just gone to hell.  

You see, on the mid shift was my highly prized super troop.  My very own PFY!  A programming genius who had the gift for system administration.  I had gotten this guy because of his bad attitude and general disrespect for anyone of higher rank.  (Yes, I was SSgt Goins att. :x)  Kinda sounded like a respectable version of me.

I had no problems out of this guy until tonight.   The PFY came to work reeking.  :beer:  From what I could get out of him, he'd only had ten pints of bitter.  As soon as I had him laid out in between two servers, the boss shows up along with the new butter bar lieutenant.  They just wanted to check out how it was going for me, being the first day as a shift supervisor and all. 8/  That's when the very drunk PFY decided to make his appearance, and hurled all over the boss.  :rolling  So much for my PFY.  (I got him back after a short stay in the brig.)

The boss decides I can't handle the helm by myself all night and decides to call in one of the other supervisors to help me out. ;(  To make matters worse for me, it was the idiot programmer turned admin who was just about clueless.:x  

Clueless showed up and immediately went to work on one his pet projects.  In doing so, he decided to "educate" me about how a computer works. "Educate ME!?"  So I humor him.  I think it was just about this point that I became a BOFH.   I couldn't take it anymore!  I made a few lame excuses about needing to get some backups done, and left the helldesk for the relative safety of the server room.

Ahh, the humming, droning sound of a thousand hard drives all running at once.  It's a sound that can put me to sleep in an instant.  But not tonight.  I was pissed and the only thing that would satisfy me was the thought of making this egotistical pseudo admin the laughing stock of the base. :evil  But how to do it?  

I've always heard that a little evil lives in everyone’s soul and waits for the opportunity to get control.  Well, tonight was my turn.  First I tracked down what sever he was working off of and logged in as root at the console.  He didn't notice the log in and I "edited" the security logs. :evil  Next I changed user to him and rsh'd to his workstation as him.  Just to make sure he didn't suspect a thing, I'd walk out to the help desk and make an entry in the MSL.  I took a look at what he was working on.  It involved some number manipulation so I went with this for my scheme.  I started popping erroneous errors in the console window of his workstation every 10 seconds or so.  The messages read something like this: "Warning!  System low on numeric resources" and " Warning! Critical error encountered.  #0"  This goes on for about ten minutes and I decide it's time to go back to the hell desk.  And what did I see?  Clueless had every manual he could find open and laying around.  He had been desperately trying to find out what the errors had meant.  And since I dropped the gateway for the Internet back in the server room, that was no help for him either. :compute:  I could feel the dread on his face even before I saw it.  He had to ask me what these messages meant.  For Clueless, there could be no worse punishment than to ask a real sys admin for help.  Or was there? :evil

"Hey Del, you every see an error like this?” he asked.  <Trap has now sprung>  Being the ever-helpful person that I am, I told him about how these errors meant that his system was about to crash hard.  After all, he had been crunching a lot of numbers tonight and the machine had simply run out of zeros.  Clueless doesn't quite believe me at this point.  So I go onto explain how in the old days, systems were manufactured with math co-processors to take care of the number crunching duties.  These math co-processors could reset themselves and not take the system down.  But because of better methods of programming that evolved, the math co-processors were no longer needed.  (DUMMY MODE ON!)  In fact processors no longer crunched numbers but are specifically designed for the Operating Systems that run on them. :rolling  Take the Sun Sparc processor for instance, which ran Sun OS and Solaris.  You'll never see Windoze running on one of those processors now will you?

About this time the crontab entry I had placed on his workstation went off.  I t ran a script I (he) placed into his home directory called "xxx.porn".  I thought security would love this.  First it threw up another console message.  "Critical error!!  System out of zeros."  Next it added another crontab entry to reboot his workstation at random five or ten minute intervals for the rest of the night.  Then it renamed most of his home directory with a "-" as the first letter of a filename.

The look on his face was a genuine Kodak moment.  He just realized that he hadn't saved the last couple of hours worth of work.  And so the dummy asked me, "How do I stop this?"  I suggested he contact the commander and ask about getting a hardware upgrade as that was the only thing I knew that would take care of his problem.  :rolling

Just before I left, I heard him asking another BOFH, whom I was a PFY to, if he had encountered this problem before.  "Oh yes, but I can't remember what fixed it.  Perhaps you should send out an email to all in the command and see if anyone remembers how to fix it."

And a Bastard was born.....

--Opie:hat

Sorry, I've been out of town.  I'll try to post more now that I'm back.

Welcome back to the land of scathing remarks.  I was hoping that your mind hadn't gone wandering too far.   It took a lot of bait to get you back into the swing of things, but aside from that, I can now go back to shredding your puny posts.:compute:

2) Let's all remember that there are younger people on the forums as well, and keep the more colorful comments to a minimum.

Pretty obvious, huh?

Easily done.

I should have clarified.  I agree on the NT thing, but not totally on the way to get things done.

If your changing the configuration of the problem stated above, has it stayed with the new OS?

Originally posted by Dragon Master
They are both based on NT and the way to get things done is the same

Not quite....


and you can use 2000 drivers for xp (IE my boomslang 2000)

Very few....XP tends to get sick if you try too many of the 2000 drivers.

Originally posted by Dragon Master
now none of the slow guys will get to lagh at my good joke (its not like i did it a lot, just 2 times);(

Waaaaaah!  Your staring to sound like Wuss.  STOP IT!