OT: Never Leave A Privilleged Session Unattended

[Robert Atkinson]

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!

:)

[Jan van den Ende]

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

[Colin Butcher]

Try embedding an XOFF character into the prompt string :)

[RBrown_1]

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

[John Gillings]

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! ;-)

[John Gillings]

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

[John Harper (Barbour)]

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

[John Gillings]

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.

[Bojan Nemec]

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