dave@galaxia.zone1.com (David H. Brierley) (09/28/88)
Most people that have worked with computers (all kinds, not just UNIX) for a
while will probably have a favorite story about fun things you can do to other
peoples prompts. UNIX people tend to have more of them because UNIX seems to
emphasize changing your prompt. I have two favorite stories in this area:
1. At one point we were running all of our terminals on ethernet based terminal
servers. One of the units developed lots of problems and while we were
waiting for the problems to be fixed we shuffled things around so that the
operations staff was all using the flaky unit (we didn't have enough units
to just pull the thing out). Having a flakey unit gave us an idea to play
a joke on one of the other members of the operations staff so we reconfigured
his terminal so that his network disconnect sequence was the same as his
login id. Whenever he tried to log in to any of the machines, the network
would disconnect him. It took him several hours before he realized that
the problem was isolated to him and that it was not the terminal server
going flakey again.
2. Recently, another member of the operations staff decided to play a similar
joke on yet another member of the staff. We now have all of our terminals
connected using a Micom port selector so he changed the other guys prompt
to be "HOST: " and then set up a bunch of command files using the names of
all of the local hosts and had them produce various error messages like
"ALL PORTS BUSY", "UNAVAILABLE", and "NO RESOURCES ASSIGNED". With the
addition of an echo command to the .profile that said "DISCONNECTED", the
poor guy was convinced that the port selector had jammed up and wasn't
letting him connect to any of the hosts.
--
David H. Brierley
Home: dave@galaxia.zone1.com ...!rayssd!galaxia!dave
Work: dhb@rayssd.ray.com {sun,decuac,gatech,necntc,ukma}!rayssd!dhbgreywolf@unisoft.UUCP (The Grey Wolf) (10/01/88)
In article <516@galaxia.zone1.com> dave@galaxia.zone1.com (David H. Brierley) writes:
[ stuff about changing prompts -- deleted, sorry! ]
This brings about the fun I had with a friend's account once...
( he used csh )
set tty=`tty`
set prompt="^M\
\
4.3 BSD UNIX (`hostname`) ($tty:t)
\
login: "
eval "echo alias $user login $user"
----
I got my come-uppance though...someone logged into my machine, on the
console. I had forgotten about his interesting prompts that he used fo
various machines. On a normal tty, I would not have reacted so badly,
but what would YOUR reaction be on a machine that was new to you, when
someone else logs in and you see the following:
[ message of the day ]
***
erase=^H kill=^X intr=^C quit=^\
***
stack overflow - SYSTEM HALTED _
^--- cursor
----
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