Re: [9fans] today's quiz

[hiro <23hiro@googlemail.com>]

What a coincidence. Just today i participated in a "Linux Network
Administrator" course. I just went there for the heck of it, not to
learn anything. I was surprised though, about the amount i did learn.
For example I learned about how...
 * gcc
 * Kde
 * Bash
 * Suse
 * Gnu in general
 * Linux in general
 * "Linux Network Administrators"
all suck ass.

One of the biggest highlights was definitely how the mentor tried to
compile gcc.

I was already flooding the machine with ssh login attempts at this
time, because some random PAM feature showed us on the big screen,
that he was changing his root password to a word from the directory.
He did that to prevent us accessing the machine any more, because we
were doing funny stuff with his account after someone got that
password yesterday.

I was waiting for the directory attack to finish for two hours, but
the machine was really slow with that compiler still running.

But I got access to the mentor's ftp in an other lame way and changed plans:
Shortly afterwards I could see him type su, which executed my script in ~/bin/.
He wrote my ssh key to /root/.ssh/authorized_keys with sudo and went
on showing us how to configure the nfs server to be "secure".

Everything got really funny. I made a loop containing "killall
konsole; sleep 360" and interfered with other kde windows in
interesting ways. That is of course annoying if you are trying to
compile gcc in a konsole.
He sadly started X as root then, forcing me to try that vmsplice exploit.
Of course it compiled in a second or so. I played around a little,
tested how fit the mentor was with faults in X configs and just before
the stupid course ended, I finally froze everything in this worthy
condition to prove that shell dos from the other thread was working.
Strangely csh, zsh, csh, tcsh, and even bash were all not vulnerable.
Only zsh proved itself capable of this great feature.

Conclusions:
Linux is not designed for Network Administration.
This would not have happened with Plan 9 from Bell Labs!

Does anyone know other interesting things to try in the rest of the
week? Or should I rather use my time there to learn more about plan9
and inferno?*g*

--
hiro