Where have all the good times gone: Fun days as a unix terrorist

Today, after a long time I decided to take a small trip to see an old friend of mine, with whom we've had a few too many all-nighters doing what we used to think we were best at, what at that time we used to call unix terrorism, or in reality just being plain unix geeks, messing around with a bit of this and a bit of that. I assure you that nobody got hurt while we were at it, but I can also tell you those were some of the happiest/funniest days of my life. As a refresher to me, the friends I've shared these crazy moments and my anonymous readers, I'm going to talk about some of those nights (staying up during the day was not really our strong point) and enumerate some of the highlights (or really lows, it's funny how when sometimes from some aspects you've hit rock bottom, years pass and you start to really appreciate the way it all happened).

So, let's get started. a few years ago, talking to some friends on irc i get my hands on what they said, and i thought to have been a 0day exploit. All cool up to this point. Logged in to my computer with an account I used to have in order to only use when testing new stuff coming from unidentified sources. Run it once. Didn't seem to delete anything. Now all I had to do was to find a target box [before you start the script kiddie flames bear in mind i just wanted to test it and i was going to leave it alone afterwards]. So, my friend suggests an old system which for the purpose of this entry I am going to name kenny. The thing didn't seem to work on kenny, and then the same friend started obsessing about how we should delete the logs. An few minutes later he gets a shadow file from a forgotten nis server in kenny's neighborhood, so decides to distribute the files to everyone. But, how do you distribute a shadow file between four geeks? Just to give you a hint, not with a usb stick, not nfs, not samba, not afs, not sending them over msn/icq/aim/whatever. You have to set up an irc server on your lan, so you can also centrally coordinate your efforts. (The thing that still escapes my understanding is the fact that anyone involved was in the exact same house, so why the hell did we really need all this? i dunno). So, because the guy was tired to set up the ircd himself he gets on his walkie talkie in order to have the following amazing conversation.

A: Dude, I need you to set up an irc server for me
B: Man, I'm kinda busy now.
A: What's up are you getting your ass kicked in an MUD again? Or just downloaded another porn flick?
B:Mkay, I'm on it.
[5 minutes later]
A: What's happening with that irc server?
B: I'm on it. Just give me a minute.
[5 minutes later again]
A: Look man, get the f* off the MUD and set up the ircd. It's important.
B: I am setting up the ircd.
[5 minutes later and after sniffing traffic to find out that the other guy was indeed in an MUD]
A: Dude, i disconnected the modem. I just downloaded bahamut on the box. Now set it up.
B: Ok, I'll start now. Any particular thing you want me to set up?
A: Just set up the ircd !&^&*!^!@*&^@*&^!@*&!^@

So, we spent the rest of the night running john etc. Moral of the story escapes me, but every time i think that they were using walkie talkies in order to talk with somebody in the next room and convince them to set up an irc server kinda cracks me up.

Then again there were other stories that were more like a recurrent theme. Like every time I got a used unix box from ebay. It all started one day, when I got an sgi indy. Happily opening up the package I connect the indy to a 13w3 monitor we got in an epic dumpster diving session. Soon enough, the indy was powered up and going through its booting sequence. When that was done, what i got was a pretty plain login window. I looked in the box for a password, nada. Tried just the usual sequence of week passwords, nothing again. Now some people may say maybe i should connect the disk to another machine, but at that time I did not have another machine that could read sgi drives. So, what do we do next? First google the matter of resetting a password. I still remember some junk about removing a jumper on the indy's mobo and then doing some things in the administative menu, but that didn't work at all. But there still had to be a way. And indeed there was, as my then working as a sysadmin friend showed me. Hook up the indy on the same network with an old laptop, and try logging in with a default account. A lot of people who have used SGIs can say that they do come with a fair share of security holes. So, soon enough we logged in via telnet, got a look at the good old /etc/passwd, soon got cracking and a bit later we were in. To our surprise none of the info that was on the box got deleted, In our hands we had a box belonging to a financial company and running just the way it would run in their offices. We figured they probably gave it to somebody ti get rid of it for them, and that someone never bothered wiping the drives. Moral of the story always wipe your drives when you decide to sell something on ebay, and always poke around when you get something. We sure did after that point.

There were a lot of other good moments to remember from back at that time. One that I believe a number of people might relate to was a moment that can really stink, but when done right and with a number of friends, it can really be fun, dumpster diving. We've tried dumpster diving in a number of different places, universities, company offices, there were nights were we would just go out for a walk and bump into something interesting coming out of a big black bin, and soon enough what would be sticking out of the bin would be one of us. Some of our most prized possessions come from dumpster diving such as a big ass 13w3 sgi monitor, computer parts, cabling, i even remember one time we got enough parts to build a completely new box, which you can see along with the indy from the previous story:





I can go on with stories, the amount of stupidity, mischief and funny stuff that can go on in a house full of geeks in three years is just too big. From setting up our machines to work as a cluster, just because we could do it, to these too many days we used to get up just to find a room fool of parts and empty pizza boxes and coffee mugs, we used to do an incredible amount of things, that without having any specific meaning at the time or even now, they are still too fun to ignore. Things I've been missing during the last year. Sometimes, just like this one I wonder what the hell has happened to us? Well, others have started working, others have gotten into the world of startups, me, I'm a research student and I hear that some have even got a life. I guess we just grew up, but times like these when it's five in the morning and I'm still awake in front of a keyboard sipping a cup of mud I can't help but to look back and hope that one day maybe we can do it again.