Got called to a professor’s office after a complaint his Sparc4 was running slow

Re:Got called to a professor’s office after a complaint his ... by myself248 on Tuesday July 25, 2023 @11:42AM (#36863984)

On our high-school network, the Guest account had NET SEND privileges. It was somehow less chaotic than one might expect.

We had a single shared T1 pipe for the whole district. Which was enough for email and stuff, but when web browsers got popular, it was suddenly woefully inadequate.

So I figured out I could NET SEND * SERVER ROOM POWER FAILURE - 9 MINUTES OF BATTERY REMAIN - SAVE YOUR WORK AND LOG OUT and after a flurry of traffic, the network fell to nearly-idle. I could max out the T1 with whatever I needed to do for a few minutes, then NET SEND * SERVER ROOM POWER RESTORED and nobody would be the wiser.

The admin did go check on the "flaky UPS" a few times before looking closely at the message. Had a good laugh and told me not to use it too often.

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Re:Got called to a professor’s office after a complaint his ... by KnobbleMcKnees on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @06:54AM (#36875574)

A great story and true BSOD material!

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Re:Got called to a professor’s office after a complaint his ... by myself248 on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @06:03PM (#36885784)

BOFH?

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Re:Got called to a professor’s office after a complaint his ... by KnobbleMcKnees on Thursday July 27, 2023 @03:25AM (#36890116)

Thanks. This was what I was going for but my brain had other ideas.

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Re:Got called to a professor’s office after a complaint his ... by pixl97 on Wednesday July 26, 2023 @08:26AM (#36876497)

This is along the lines of my early days learning about computers at school. I saw executables were filled with weird junk when looked at in a text viewer. So I'd load a little of that junk in a file and add

CRITICAL DISK ERROR. TURN OFF SYSTEM TO AVOID CATASTROPHIC DATA LOSS

and then printed it out to a system printer students didn't have access too. So you got a page of random symbols and that error.

Little did I know the company adding more computers to the network was there that day and the guy panicked and had the system shut down, it was down the next day too. I never did ask what happened to bring attention to myself, and this was before we had individual accounts in the system.

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