[Gllug] Router under attack: help/advice needed

[Nix]

On 22 Oct 2009, Daniel Kingshott told this:
> SITUATION: Poor network response.
[...]
> MANIAC: 
> Every two hours, pulls ethernet cable from wall and waits for connections to time out. 

You think this is a joke, but this was silently implemented at my
workplace (by a bunch of high corporate goons we'd never seen before or
since) about half a year ago. For 'security'. Not telling anyone didn't
help because everyone was astronomically pissed off within a day.

(let's see, how much damage can a cracker do in two hours before they helpfully
kill all non-root processes and force you to log in again?)

We pointed out to the people who implemented this brilliant policy that
killing everyone's editors every two hours without warning was
devastating to productivity and it didn't actually improve security at
all, and that it took nearly two hours to restart all the Oracle daemons
after they kill -9ed them.

They said it was 'policy'. We asked them to show us the policy.

They changed their tune and said they could wall a warning (and, what,
the Oracle daemons would read it?). We pointed out that this wasn't much
use unless everyone was at their desks permanently (no meetings, lunch
&c).

They tried to say that running non-root processes for extended periods
of time was 'destabilizing', made vague reference to running out of old
BSD-style ptys, and quoted an old Microsoft knowledge base article about
Windows NT 3.51 (?!) and talked about the user and GDI heaps and memory
fragmentation. We pointed out that Solaris is not Windows NT nor Win95
and neither is Linux.

They tried argument from authority. You can guess how well *that*
worked.

They finally backed down.

Corporate IT: Microsoft-trained morons, all of them.

> TECHNICAL THUG: 
> Hacks the code of emacs' doctor-mode to answer new users
> questions. Doesn't bother to tell people how to start the new
> "guru-mode", or for that matter, emacs.

Emacs is set as the default shell for all new users anyway!

> IDIOT: 
> Answers all questions to best of his knowledge until the user realizes
> few UNIX systems support punched cards or JCL.

Or are Windows NT 3.51.

> SITUATION: Religious war, BSD vs. System V 

This list really is showing its age now... that's one war that died long
ago. Both sides lost.

> OTHER GUIDELINES:
>
> TYPICAL ROOT .cshrc FILE: 
>
> TECHNICAL THUG: 
> Longer than eight kilobytes. Sources the output of a perl script, rewrites itself. 

<http://ft.bewatermyfriend.org/comp/zsh.html>, especially zdepend() in
<http://ft.bewatermyfriend.org/comp/zsh/zshrc.real.html>.

> COMPOUND SYSTEM ADMINISTRATORS:
>
> TECHNICAL FASCIST: 
> Hacks kernel & writes a horde of scripts to prevent folk from ever
> using more than their fair share of system resources. Resulting
> overhead and load brings system to its knees.

I was one of these once, when I was twelve. Primary purpose: prevent my
sister from seeing what I was doing by any technical means, as if she'd
have cared. Rather than learn piles of geek stuff, she looked over my
shoulder. I hadn't thought of that.)

I got better.
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