Thursday, December 30, 2004
Root becomes me
The cold raindrops stung my face like needles as I rode on my motorcycle to the computer centre. I had to squint my eyes to prevent the piercing pain caused by the raindrops when they hit my eyes. The drops were more tolerable on my unprotected hands although it seemed as if my hands were going to pieces, broken by the merciless impact of millions of invisible liquid needles. The night wasn't very cold, a mild thirteen degrees celcius, pleasant for somebody who is walking but chillingly cold for somebody riding a bike, the wind and rain stealing the heat from the body.
My denim jacket was more a protection from the wind than the rain and the chill, against which it could offer minimal protection. The three and a half kilometer stretch from my house to the college seemed longer and more painful in the cold night, particularly because the roads were empty and I was riding alone. About a hundred yards away I could see the gates of my college, one of the doors of which was slightly open. An arch rising high above the gates proudly displayed the name of the college: Sri Jayachamarajendra College of Engineering. On either side of the gates stretched walls which marked the boundary between the campus and the street, made of concrete cast bricks held together by cement. The road I was riding on stretched from the University to the college. It was a vertical curve, going downhill from the university to Downs, the university canteen, and going up again, straight into the gates of the college. Lots of students showed off on this stretch of road, speeding on the straight stretch and screeching to a halt near Downs. In summer the Mayflower trees on either sides of the road would lay a carpet of flowers on the the road, spilling a mild fragrance to all those who cared to notice.
The guard at the gate stopped me and asked me where I was going. I told him I was going to the computer centre. He asked me for my slot card. The slot card was a small card bearing the student's photograph and the System Manager's signature on the reverse, verifying the validity of the card till the end of the calender year. I took out my card and showed it to him. He stared at the card for a moment and let me in. The night slot was a concept conceived by the System Manager, Professor Hariharan. Students had to reserve time slots on whatever machines they wanted to work on, and come at the appropriate time. Slots for all machines would generally be full until midnight, especially when project or assignment deadlines approached. After one A.M., half the machines would be bare. After two thirty A.M., only a small bunch of people would be present. These were the active members of the Hackers' Club, a bunch of students hopelessly addicted to programming.
I stopped my bike near the centre and ran up two flights of stairs. The computer centre consisted of two halls and a medium sized room, which was also a classroom. The bigger hall was divided into three compartments, the smaller middle and the larger laterals seperated by glass walls. One large partition contained the HCL system's terminals and the other contained the Kirloskar system's terminals and a variety of machines belonging to the IBM PC family, all of which were part of the Novell LAN.
In between the two was the system room, which contained the HCL machine, which ran BSD UNIX, the Kirloskar machine, which ran System V UNIX, a Novell Netware Server, two line printers and a modem, in addition to all floppies, magnetic tapes and whatever that has to have restricted access. A ten feet wide passage seperated the larger hall from the smaller one, which had some more IBM PC family machines, all diskless, all connected to the Netware server. This room was also used as a microprocessor lab and was referred to as the mu-p lab. There were tables in neat rows on the passage side of the hall, on which the microprocessor kits would be placed during the lab hours. They were empty at night and one could sleep on them if he was very sleepy or dry his jacket if it was wet. This room was not airconditioned, which was a blessing on nights such as these. The SACL room was on the same side of the passage as the mu-p lab, also not airconditioned, also containing diskless LAN nodes but these were ATs, arranged in a square, with one machine connected to a screen projector. P.G classes were held here, in addition to some special courses. Everyone came first to the SACL room, hoping to find some vacant ATs and would then go to the other rooms. I went straight to the mu-p lab, knowing fully well that the other rooms would undoubtedly be full at ten p.m. I tossed my jacket on a table and searched for an empty machine. There was one near Sarcasm. I went and sat near him, pretending to ignore him. Sarcasm looked at me and back to the screen. We worked silently for a while. People started to leave at around one a.m. and soon only four of us were present. Sarcasm started to sing a very old Hindi song in an loud, off-key, irritating voice.
"Shut up!" I said, unable to bear the torture. Sarcasm sang louder and stretched the different notes in order to irritate me more. I said with disgust: "Sarcasm, your singing is atrocious."
"You are jealous," said Sarcasm and continued with his crooning. Sarcasm was usually extremely irritating. He would make sarcastic remarks at whatever anyone said or did and would love to find a base motive for any action. He would laugh at anything and try to embarrass people as much as possible. He had the least confidence in anybody and doubted every seemingly altruistic deed. He would do his best to make people around him uncomfortable. This was why I liked being with him so much. He was the ultimate endurance test for me and I had improved my patience and forbearance by being in his company. In the begining I had to exert some effort to prevent myself from killing him, but now I could take anything he said or did without any effort at all. The only exception perhaps was his singing, which was intolerable to any civilized creature. If he sang, I would get my revenge by riding fast the next time he sat behind me on my bike. Sarcasm would panic, sure that he would die and plead me to slow down. I would make him promise never to sing in my presence before slowing down.
I attempted to work despite his singing, which was sheer torture. I got up to go to the Kirloskar room. Sarcasm tasted victory and broke into mocking laughter. He exaggerated whatever laughter that came naturally, trying diligently to be as insulting as possible.
The Kirloskar room had two ATs between many XTs, each at one end of the wall beside the passage. The wall had large glass windows, enabling a clear view of the passage. As I went in, I saw the Wipro AT near the door, the wheels of the black chair in front of it creaking, indicating that it had just been emptied. The cursor after the prompt was blinking patiently, waiting for a hand to hit the keyboard, giving it energy to come alive. I sat on the machine and worked for a while, until I finished the current project. I decided to relax for a while, take time to explore the system, discover new things and have fun in general.
I looked at my watch. Three a.m. - time for some fun. I always spared some time to explore the system. Learning something new every day had something to do with the 'high' of computer science. Let's see, what could I try today? I remembered the AutoCad classes that were going on in the SACL room. I logged into the account 'ACAD', in order to work on AutoCad. I had used it, but I wasn't an expert. Whereas most software was available by mapping thier directories as drives, some like AutoCad had seperate accounts. One had to login as ACAD to access it. Usually there were no passwords, or the password would be the login name itself. I tried different features of AutoCad, which was a pain without a mouse. The admin connected mice to the machines just before the ACAD classes began and took them off immedeately after. They rightly feared that students would pocket the mice if they were left on the desktops. After playing for a while on AutoCad, I logged out.
I wanted to check out FOCUS, another software that was accessible through an account. I had heard that FOCUS was a 4GL and all that but had never seen it. I tried logging into FOCUS, hoping to fool around with it and learn something. The system asked for a password. I tried the login name itself, which worked. I had logged in successfully. However instead of the expected F:\FOCUS path, I saw K:\DATABASE on the screen, staring at me. This made me wonder what could be in F: drive? I changed to F: drive and the prompt F:\LOGIN greeted me. I was in the LOGIN directory! I checked the directory to make sure. I saw the files belonging to the LOGIN directory, confirming my suspicions. I also saw some data files, which were similar to the ones in the K: drive. I found that strange. How could the guys who use FOCUS possibly create files in this directory? How did they get the rights? I ran the RIGHTS command, which lists what rights one has in the current directory, and saw that I had all rights to this area. A doubt surfaced in my mind: Is this the same LOGIN directory or a copy? To find out, I opened a dummy file in the directory and logged out. I ran the DIR command, which should list the dummy file along with the others if the directory wasn't a copy, and saw that FOCUS indeed had rights to the login directory.
This was dangerous. There was always the possibility of some maniac finding out about this and altering or deleting the contents of the LOGIN directory. I logged in to FOCUS again and entered GRANT ROS ONLY TO FOCUS on the command line. This should give only read files, open files, and search directory rights. The new rights would not be enforced until I logged in again, so I had to logout and login again. I executed the RIGHTS command to check if the new rights were in place. I still had all the rights! "Maybe, the GRANT command is not working," I thought and loaded SYSCON to change the rights. You can do a lot of things with SYSCON, even if you were not the SUPERVISOR. It was a menu driven, user friendly software which was generally used by the admin to control the lives of the lesser mortals in their Cyberspace. They would control what accounts could login from what terminals during what time of the day. They could control what files you could see in what directories and what you could do there. I would occaisonally select 'User Information' from the main menu and fool around with different sub-menus. This time I selected TRUSTEE DIRECTORY ASSIGNMENTS of FOCUS. There was the login directory with ROS next to it. So FOCUS had only read, open and search! I exited SYSCON and sucessfully created and deleted a dummy file. I found it strange that I had all
rights inspite of the fact that SYSCON reported only read, open and search. I soon discovered that I had rights everywhere in the system. I could not understand what the heck was going on. FOCUS apparently had SUPERVISOR powers. I loaded SYSCON again to check if I could fool around with the SUPERVISOR OPTIONS in it. I discovered that I could easily do everything I wanted to. There was something different about this account that made it omnipotent. I had to find out what it was. I loaded SYSCON and proceeded to make a thorough check of FOCUS. Under SECURITY EQUIVILENCES, I saw the entry SUPERVISOR. I instantly realized that for all practical purposes, I was the SUPERVISOR as long as I could login to FOCUS. But the users of this account might change the password, so I had to create another account and give it SUPERVISOR equivalence.
I created an account called DIAGS and gave it SUPERVISOR equivalence. I had a vague reasoning that a name like DIAGS would evoke the least suspicion if it was found to have SUPERVISOR equivalence. I also created a non-supervisor equivalent account called FRAC, which mapped straight into the HACKERS directory.
I used DIAGS to fix all the little problems that had creeped into the system. Somebody had modified a NetWare API file, nit.h. The line
#include was replaced with
#include.
This meant that we had to assign the drive mappings carefully so that the C compiler mapped to the T: drive. I fixed this problem by removing the t:. I also set some default options in different software to ones which were more useful to the students, like autoindent in editors.
After doing all these, I felt that I should flex my SUPERVISOR muscles. Not too often, of course not, but I had to get some thrills out of this. As I was wondering what to do, one of the system overseers came to a machine that was six terminals to the left of mine. This particular
guy evoked the most intense hatred among the students. He was snoopy, asked unnecessary questions, irritated everybody and acted as if he was doing us a favour by letting us work. The most noticiable feature about this person was his irritating voice which sounded like an amalgamation of a crow's cry and the screeching of brakes. He would find intense pleasure in ordering people to logout for all kinds of reasons and tell them to come after an hour or so. People like these actually serve a very important purpose in any organization by directing hate towards themselves. This eases tensions among the student population, uniting them against a common enemy. One of the prime forces in the creation of hackers are these wonderful people, who spur students to learn, albeit to beat the tyrannical overseers. Personally, if I were to open an educational centre, I would employ this man, paying him double of whatever he was getting here since I was sure that he would be a motivation for the students to excel.
I logged into his account, wondering what trick I could play on him. How about some confusing message as soon as he logs in? How about logging him out after so much time? Delete some files? I looked at his files. Fibonnacci series and quadratic equations in FORTRAN. But I could not bring myself to delete any. Not only didn't I have the heart to do it, I didn't wan't him to suspect anything. I decided to remove his password instead. I logged into DIAGS, removed his password and logged out. I then logged into HACKERS, the account used by the members of the Hackers' Club, and opened some file, pretending to edit it. Meanwhile our man logged into his account and was surprised to see that it did not ask for a password! He stared at the screen blankly. He turned slowly and looked at me suspiciously. I was looking at him from the corner of my eye and as soon as he turned towards me, I started typing, pretending to be absorbed in my program.
In our college, students were given excercise programs to write, usually identical. Generally students would write programs, compile, execute and forget about them, which would lead to a large collection of unwanted files of the type *.OBJ, *.EXE and *.BAK. Space would soon fill up and there would be real estate constraints, notably during compilation. I had previously written a mass file deletion utility called RM, which had a powerful recurse option. I ran RM to remove these unwanted files every now and then. Small and subtle changes like these made the network run smoothly. People hardly noticed these changes however, and nobody suspected that somebody else had become SUPERVISOR.
My denim jacket was more a protection from the wind than the rain and the chill, against which it could offer minimal protection. The three and a half kilometer stretch from my house to the college seemed longer and more painful in the cold night, particularly because the roads were empty and I was riding alone. About a hundred yards away I could see the gates of my college, one of the doors of which was slightly open. An arch rising high above the gates proudly displayed the name of the college: Sri Jayachamarajendra College of Engineering. On either side of the gates stretched walls which marked the boundary between the campus and the street, made of concrete cast bricks held together by cement. The road I was riding on stretched from the University to the college. It was a vertical curve, going downhill from the university to Downs, the university canteen, and going up again, straight into the gates of the college. Lots of students showed off on this stretch of road, speeding on the straight stretch and screeching to a halt near Downs. In summer the Mayflower trees on either sides of the road would lay a carpet of flowers on the the road, spilling a mild fragrance to all those who cared to notice.
The guard at the gate stopped me and asked me where I was going. I told him I was going to the computer centre. He asked me for my slot card. The slot card was a small card bearing the student's photograph and the System Manager's signature on the reverse, verifying the validity of the card till the end of the calender year. I took out my card and showed it to him. He stared at the card for a moment and let me in. The night slot was a concept conceived by the System Manager, Professor Hariharan. Students had to reserve time slots on whatever machines they wanted to work on, and come at the appropriate time. Slots for all machines would generally be full until midnight, especially when project or assignment deadlines approached. After one A.M., half the machines would be bare. After two thirty A.M., only a small bunch of people would be present. These were the active members of the Hackers' Club, a bunch of students hopelessly addicted to programming.
I stopped my bike near the centre and ran up two flights of stairs. The computer centre consisted of two halls and a medium sized room, which was also a classroom. The bigger hall was divided into three compartments, the smaller middle and the larger laterals seperated by glass walls. One large partition contained the HCL system's terminals and the other contained the Kirloskar system's terminals and a variety of machines belonging to the IBM PC family, all of which were part of the Novell LAN.
In between the two was the system room, which contained the HCL machine, which ran BSD UNIX, the Kirloskar machine, which ran System V UNIX, a Novell Netware Server, two line printers and a modem, in addition to all floppies, magnetic tapes and whatever that has to have restricted access. A ten feet wide passage seperated the larger hall from the smaller one, which had some more IBM PC family machines, all diskless, all connected to the Netware server. This room was also used as a microprocessor lab and was referred to as the mu-p lab. There were tables in neat rows on the passage side of the hall, on which the microprocessor kits would be placed during the lab hours. They were empty at night and one could sleep on them if he was very sleepy or dry his jacket if it was wet. This room was not airconditioned, which was a blessing on nights such as these. The SACL room was on the same side of the passage as the mu-p lab, also not airconditioned, also containing diskless LAN nodes but these were ATs, arranged in a square, with one machine connected to a screen projector. P.G classes were held here, in addition to some special courses. Everyone came first to the SACL room, hoping to find some vacant ATs and would then go to the other rooms. I went straight to the mu-p lab, knowing fully well that the other rooms would undoubtedly be full at ten p.m. I tossed my jacket on a table and searched for an empty machine. There was one near Sarcasm. I went and sat near him, pretending to ignore him. Sarcasm looked at me and back to the screen. We worked silently for a while. People started to leave at around one a.m. and soon only four of us were present. Sarcasm started to sing a very old Hindi song in an loud, off-key, irritating voice.
"Shut up!" I said, unable to bear the torture. Sarcasm sang louder and stretched the different notes in order to irritate me more. I said with disgust: "Sarcasm, your singing is atrocious."
"You are jealous," said Sarcasm and continued with his crooning. Sarcasm was usually extremely irritating. He would make sarcastic remarks at whatever anyone said or did and would love to find a base motive for any action. He would laugh at anything and try to embarrass people as much as possible. He had the least confidence in anybody and doubted every seemingly altruistic deed. He would do his best to make people around him uncomfortable. This was why I liked being with him so much. He was the ultimate endurance test for me and I had improved my patience and forbearance by being in his company. In the begining I had to exert some effort to prevent myself from killing him, but now I could take anything he said or did without any effort at all. The only exception perhaps was his singing, which was intolerable to any civilized creature. If he sang, I would get my revenge by riding fast the next time he sat behind me on my bike. Sarcasm would panic, sure that he would die and plead me to slow down. I would make him promise never to sing in my presence before slowing down.
I attempted to work despite his singing, which was sheer torture. I got up to go to the Kirloskar room. Sarcasm tasted victory and broke into mocking laughter. He exaggerated whatever laughter that came naturally, trying diligently to be as insulting as possible.
The Kirloskar room had two ATs between many XTs, each at one end of the wall beside the passage. The wall had large glass windows, enabling a clear view of the passage. As I went in, I saw the Wipro AT near the door, the wheels of the black chair in front of it creaking, indicating that it had just been emptied. The cursor after the prompt was blinking patiently, waiting for a hand to hit the keyboard, giving it energy to come alive. I sat on the machine and worked for a while, until I finished the current project. I decided to relax for a while, take time to explore the system, discover new things and have fun in general.
I looked at my watch. Three a.m. - time for some fun. I always spared some time to explore the system. Learning something new every day had something to do with the 'high' of computer science. Let's see, what could I try today? I remembered the AutoCad classes that were going on in the SACL room. I logged into the account 'ACAD', in order to work on AutoCad. I had used it, but I wasn't an expert. Whereas most software was available by mapping thier directories as drives, some like AutoCad had seperate accounts. One had to login as ACAD to access it. Usually there were no passwords, or the password would be the login name itself. I tried different features of AutoCad, which was a pain without a mouse. The admin connected mice to the machines just before the ACAD classes began and took them off immedeately after. They rightly feared that students would pocket the mice if they were left on the desktops. After playing for a while on AutoCad, I logged out.
I wanted to check out FOCUS, another software that was accessible through an account. I had heard that FOCUS was a 4GL and all that but had never seen it. I tried logging into FOCUS, hoping to fool around with it and learn something. The system asked for a password. I tried the login name itself, which worked. I had logged in successfully. However instead of the expected F:\FOCUS path, I saw K:\DATABASE on the screen, staring at me. This made me wonder what could be in F: drive? I changed to F: drive and the prompt F:\LOGIN greeted me. I was in the LOGIN directory! I checked the directory to make sure. I saw the files belonging to the LOGIN directory, confirming my suspicions. I also saw some data files, which were similar to the ones in the K: drive. I found that strange. How could the guys who use FOCUS possibly create files in this directory? How did they get the rights? I ran the RIGHTS command, which lists what rights one has in the current directory, and saw that I had all rights to this area. A doubt surfaced in my mind: Is this the same LOGIN directory or a copy? To find out, I opened a dummy file in the directory and logged out. I ran the DIR command, which should list the dummy file along with the others if the directory wasn't a copy, and saw that FOCUS indeed had rights to the login directory.
This was dangerous. There was always the possibility of some maniac finding out about this and altering or deleting the contents of the LOGIN directory. I logged in to FOCUS again and entered GRANT ROS ONLY TO FOCUS on the command line. This should give only read files, open files, and search directory rights. The new rights would not be enforced until I logged in again, so I had to logout and login again. I executed the RIGHTS command to check if the new rights were in place. I still had all the rights! "Maybe, the GRANT command is not working," I thought and loaded SYSCON to change the rights. You can do a lot of things with SYSCON, even if you were not the SUPERVISOR. It was a menu driven, user friendly software which was generally used by the admin to control the lives of the lesser mortals in their Cyberspace. They would control what accounts could login from what terminals during what time of the day. They could control what files you could see in what directories and what you could do there. I would occaisonally select 'User Information' from the main menu and fool around with different sub-menus. This time I selected TRUSTEE DIRECTORY ASSIGNMENTS of FOCUS. There was the login directory with ROS next to it. So FOCUS had only read, open and search! I exited SYSCON and sucessfully created and deleted a dummy file. I found it strange that I had all
rights inspite of the fact that SYSCON reported only read, open and search. I soon discovered that I had rights everywhere in the system. I could not understand what the heck was going on. FOCUS apparently had SUPERVISOR powers. I loaded SYSCON again to check if I could fool around with the SUPERVISOR OPTIONS in it. I discovered that I could easily do everything I wanted to. There was something different about this account that made it omnipotent. I had to find out what it was. I loaded SYSCON and proceeded to make a thorough check of FOCUS. Under SECURITY EQUIVILENCES, I saw the entry SUPERVISOR. I instantly realized that for all practical purposes, I was the SUPERVISOR as long as I could login to FOCUS. But the users of this account might change the password, so I had to create another account and give it SUPERVISOR equivalence.
I created an account called DIAGS and gave it SUPERVISOR equivalence. I had a vague reasoning that a name like DIAGS would evoke the least suspicion if it was found to have SUPERVISOR equivalence. I also created a non-supervisor equivalent account called FRAC, which mapped straight into the HACKERS directory.
I used DIAGS to fix all the little problems that had creeped into the system. Somebody had modified a NetWare API file, nit.h. The line
#include
#include
This meant that we had to assign the drive mappings carefully so that the C compiler mapped to the T: drive. I fixed this problem by removing the t:. I also set some default options in different software to ones which were more useful to the students, like autoindent in editors.
After doing all these, I felt that I should flex my SUPERVISOR muscles. Not too often, of course not, but I had to get some thrills out of this. As I was wondering what to do, one of the system overseers came to a machine that was six terminals to the left of mine. This particular
guy evoked the most intense hatred among the students. He was snoopy, asked unnecessary questions, irritated everybody and acted as if he was doing us a favour by letting us work. The most noticiable feature about this person was his irritating voice which sounded like an amalgamation of a crow's cry and the screeching of brakes. He would find intense pleasure in ordering people to logout for all kinds of reasons and tell them to come after an hour or so. People like these actually serve a very important purpose in any organization by directing hate towards themselves. This eases tensions among the student population, uniting them against a common enemy. One of the prime forces in the creation of hackers are these wonderful people, who spur students to learn, albeit to beat the tyrannical overseers. Personally, if I were to open an educational centre, I would employ this man, paying him double of whatever he was getting here since I was sure that he would be a motivation for the students to excel.
I logged into his account, wondering what trick I could play on him. How about some confusing message as soon as he logs in? How about logging him out after so much time? Delete some files? I looked at his files. Fibonnacci series and quadratic equations in FORTRAN. But I could not bring myself to delete any. Not only didn't I have the heart to do it, I didn't wan't him to suspect anything. I decided to remove his password instead. I logged into DIAGS, removed his password and logged out. I then logged into HACKERS, the account used by the members of the Hackers' Club, and opened some file, pretending to edit it. Meanwhile our man logged into his account and was surprised to see that it did not ask for a password! He stared at the screen blankly. He turned slowly and looked at me suspiciously. I was looking at him from the corner of my eye and as soon as he turned towards me, I started typing, pretending to be absorbed in my program.
In our college, students were given excercise programs to write, usually identical. Generally students would write programs, compile, execute and forget about them, which would lead to a large collection of unwanted files of the type *.OBJ, *.EXE and *.BAK. Space would soon fill up and there would be real estate constraints, notably during compilation. I had previously written a mass file deletion utility called RM, which had a powerful recurse option. I ran RM to remove these unwanted files every now and then. Small and subtle changes like these made the network run smoothly. People hardly noticed these changes however, and nobody suspected that somebody else had become SUPERVISOR.
Subscribe to Comments [Atom]
