I tried to flip it back on just afterward, to resume my business (lol) but found that my login was blocked with a message...come up to security in room 300-something and talk to us to get your account un-suspended.
The issue leading to the frantic shutdown: I was reading JWZ's journals online...the old about:jwz trick.
Within those pages, there's a linked clip of the fake *rgasm scene from "When Harry Met Sally".
I clicked on the link not realizing what would happen, and of course this passionate audio clip played at more or less full volume to a computer lab full of university students from China.
Back then Netscape didn't show any audio controls that I could find anywhere when clips like that played, which was also a really frustrating part of this. I guess it just handed off the audio to some process which I could have found via `top` if I had the time.
Anyway, I got my lecture, got the account back, and fortunately none of the Chinese students seemed to have let my er..._BYU_ CS security admins...know about the situation in the lab. lol. (No longer a practicing Mormon; still think CDE is cool)
This is a good garden-path sentence.
The other guesses were: CDE - Common Desktop Environment, MTC - Missionary Training Center.
GPT is much better than web search for this, I'll say that. It's ability to use context is invaluable.
This user group was already in place by the time Linux came along, so you had the UUG doing Red Hat boxed set giveaways and such. There was a ton of excitement about Linux and not as much about Unix at that point. Then a bit more proper-Unix excitement when OS X came out.
The other ones are correct.
GPT is useful, but there's an annoying tendency of it's proponents to promote it with examples they haven't validated.
> UUG is an acronym for: Uniface Users Group. Universal Underwriters Group. Unix User Group.
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.
graybeard chuckles in the server room
But that’s probably why they don’t come out to lecture.