Remove “This incident will be reported.” from user warnings

Alright, did I tell my college sysadmin story already? This is the perfect place to drop it.

1990, freshman in college, Pascal class on AT&T Unix SVR3 3B2 cluster named "earth", "wind", and "fire". We'd just learned our way around "vi" and how to "uvapc" our Pascal source into a.out.

I discovered anonymous ftp, and "make", and I quickly rose to become the gaming king of Pascal class. I had ularn, nethack, megs and megs of games crammed in my no-quota $HOME, and I'd opened permissions for everyone else to access and play them. I often chit-chatted with a classmate or two over "write" or "ytalk".

Not content to merely play games, I became mischievous with the system and its inner workings. I created a .profile and a .plan, the latter of which used VT100 cursor escape sequences to self-modify the screen, such as changing my $HOME to "/" and I also made a boastful comment about having root access.

It was all in good fun, and then came the day that I discovered /etc/passwd and I attempted to "su" to every single system account I found listed. I mean some of their passwords were just "*" so they must've been wide open!!1

I soon received ominous, chilling email from the unseen sysadmin of the whole cluster. He described to me everything I'd done up to this point, and he informed me that saying I have root access is like telling airport officials that I have a bomb. That point definitely drove it home to me as a young and dumb hacker.

So, for the rest of my short college career, while I did some silly "extra-curricular" things with my own compute resources, I was careful to not try and break system security, or even say that I had, for fear of the wrath of the unseen sysadmin.

Learned something new today!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

Yes....?

If I see info in logs and it could help a user (my userbase is internal), I reach out to them. I've coached a number of them through improving something on their end, even if it's not a critical change.

And I'm by no means some sysadmin wizard.

Not to comment on this particular case, but this is a more useful tactic than it seems at first. Seeing the reaction that an alarm brings can provide lots of useful information for evading future ones.

Also former BYU EE major (and former Mormon), very early 2000's. I recall fondly those HP-UX boxen running CDE. I really liked that UX. For some reason it really appealed to me as an engineering student. I was very active in the UUG. At one point I lived in a married student housing unit. Some of the kids fucking incessantly in those units could have stood to make sure their windows were closed. But I digress. Story time!

This was in the early days of Napster. Out of curiosity I downloaded and unzipped it in my home directory. I think I started downloading some random file but terminated it before it finished. Several weeks later when trying to log into my account, it didn't work. When I asked the skinny kid in the admin room about it, he lectured me about having the Napster software unzipped in my home directory before telling me to delete it as he re-enabled my account.

I was generally low-trust when it came to anything administration-related at my school, so I kept my own backups of all my shit. That ended up saving my ass. The HP-UX boxen were configured to dump huge core files by default on segfaults. The predictable thing happened as random widely-ignored core files proliferated throughout student home directories. I think about 2 weeks before the end of the semester, some low-level admin kid tried writing a script that recursively walks all the students' home directories and deletes core files to free up disk space. Not wanting the script to interfere with regular workloads during the day, he had it run as a cron job in the middle of the night. The kid fucked up the script, and it instead deleted all the contents of everyone's directory for the whole goddamned department. Well, effectively. I think when the admins got into work the next morning they realized that shit was completely fucked and killed the script. But massive damage had already been done. Two weeks before the end of the semester when final class projects were all coming due. Also, the backups hadn't been working, and nobody had been giving a fuck. Until then.

I had a friend in another lab in the CS department who ran a Tor exit node from his workstation. Fast forward a few weeks, and his advisor sat him down and, with a really serious tone, asked if there's anything he wanted to talk about with respect to his usage of the lab computers. Apparently some of the shit the Tor exit nodes were accessing made some waves in the department. (Bearing in mind that BYU is a very religiously conservative institution.) He somehow survived that incident, but he went out into the Real World (there's a pun here -- you should look up the whole Julie Stoffer debacle sometime) not long after of his own accord.

Then there were the students who abused the lab laser printers to print wedding invitations. All the fucking time. IIRC, it was only 10 cents a page, so it was a steal to print really nice-looking stuff at the time. Even better were the students who fed not-safe-for-laser-printer shit into the them that would melt and gunk up the insides.

Some assholes would often lock the screen rather than log out in order to "reserve" an HP-UX workstation for themselves. That got annoying when things were busy. I'd do a hard reboot whenever I ran across an unoccupied locked workstation. Apparently there were some grad students whose work that they were distributing across several nodes as background jobs would get fucked when the workstations were hard-rebooted. Personally I think that should have been a hard lesson in a "cattle, not pets" approach to distributed systems. Especially when there is effectively no physical security for the compute nodes.

There are also UUG stories. One of my favorite is when the UUG was handing out "Software for Starving Students" CDs full of OSS software in the student quad. They ended up getting reported to the "authorities" for distributing software for free.