topic Re: OT: Never Leave A Privilleged Session Unattended in Operating System - OpenVMS

OT: Never Leave A Privilleged Session Unattended

Robert Atkinson — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 12:31:04 GMT

Used to love leaving this running on the Operators PC's when they disappeared and left the session unlocked.

Never seen someone go so white!

:)

Re: OT: Never Leave A Privilleged Session Unattended

Jan van den Ende — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 15:07:28 GMT

Robert,

slightly different, but in my early (VMS 3.2) days I had someting similar april for fools day.

It did a DIR, pasted it into a DELETED message.
For the entire SYS$LOGIN directory tree.
Then logged out.

On the next login it displayed:
April 1st -- but do not tell anyone yet.

Pretty soon it was necessary to put the phone OFF the hook at Operations and System Management....

Oh well, those were the days.

Proost.

Have one on me.

jpe

Re: OT: Never Leave A Privilleged Session Unattended

Colin Butcher — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 18:00:48 GMT

Try embedding an XOFF character into the prompt string :)

Re: OT: Never Leave A Privilleged Session Unattended

RBrown_1 — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 19:59:36 GMT

Of course this gag works just as well for non-privileged users. Perhaps better.

Re: OT: Never Leave A Privilleged Session Unattended

John Gillings — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 21:02:57 GMT

Back in V1.0 days, a lecturer at my university made the mistake of leaving a terminal open. The only change was to redefine the LOGOUT command to issue a message instead of logging out:

%LOGOUT-E-DISABLED, Logouts are currently disabled, please try again later.

The biggest surprise was he actually believed it! ;-)

Re: OT: Never Leave A Privilleged Session Unattended

John Gillings — Mon, 29 Nov 2010 23:20:45 GMT

Robert,

Here's an nastier procedure that closes quite a few loopholes left open by your procedure:

TRICK.COM
$ MACRO/OBJ=FAIL SYS$INPUT
.TITLE FAIL
$RMSDEF
.ENTRY start,^M<>
MOVL #RMS$_FNF,R0
RET
.END start
$ LINK FAIL
$ DEFINE/NOLOG FAIL 'F$SEARCH("FAIL.EXE")'
$ DEFINE/NOLOG DIRECTORY FAIL
$ DEFINE/NOLOG TYPE FAIL
$ DEFINE/NOLOG DELETE FAIL
$ DEFINE/NOLOG SEARCH FAIL
$ DEFINE/NOLOG VMSHELP FAIL
$ SET COMMAND SYS$INPUT
DEFINE VERB LOGOUT
SYNONYM LO
IMAGE FAIL
qualifier brief
qualifier full
qualifier hangup
$ EXIT

Re: OT: Never Leave A Privilleged Session Unattended

John Harper (Barbour) — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 12:28:51 GMT

John,

I tried compiling and running your little assembler program but I don't think it worked. All I got was

%RMS-E-FNF, file not found

John :)

p.s. anyone remember ZOOP from RSTS days

Re: OT: Never Leave A Privilleged Session Unattended

John Gillings — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 21:50:51 GMT

re the other John:

Sounds like it works perfectly! The purpose of the little program is to generate exactly that message.

The DEFINE commands will redirect all versions the named commands to run the program which issues the error, so no need to run inside a DCL shell loop, and no need to parse all the possible variants of the commands.

The LOGOUT command is implemented as a CLI routine, so hijacking it requires some CLD.

Re: OT: Never Leave A Privilleged Session Unattended

Bojan Nemec — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 17:02:05 GMT

Robert,

For more "damage" the procedure can be upgraded with:

$ RECALL/ERASE

$ dir*ectory=="write sys$error ""%DIRECT-W-NOFILES, no files found""!"
$ EXIT

Taken from an old joke similar to the one mentioned by Jan.

Bojan