Sys-Admin Fun with Users

[Shannon Petry]

Just sharing some of the things I have done/do to annoy users. To us Admins, turn-about is fair play sometimes.

1. I have the Xprogram xgreasymouse hidden on many systems. I'll telnet to machines, su - to the user and set the display to their hostname. Then run greesymouse for about 30 seconds, then shut it off. Repeat every 5-10 minutes about 3-4 times.
NOTE: I have had bug reports submitted, but never been caught.

2. Rename their sub-directories. Usually, I'll just add things in front so that I can just awk them off to remove. Fun to watch users look inside of CAD for their files and directories, which no longer exist.

3. Change quotas to enforce hard limits at 1K. Blame problems on restoring the data they "accidentally" rm -rf'd an hour before.

4. Watch for them to login into a machine that IM working on, then kill their login session. Repeat till Im done, and not tell user anything. Usually after the 5-6th try loggin in, they come ask.

6. Ask them the same question 12 times within 1/2 hour.

7. Tell the designers their parts dont look really good. Tell developers their code is sloppy and could be done much easier.

8. Spread beneficial rumors. I.E. pssst "I heard the sys-admin got a job offer for 20K more a year down the street." Helps my bargaining power through the year, and makes designers mad thinking the sys-admin can make money.
9. replace binaries sometimes. I.E. I swaped nedit for dtpad. Users everywhere scratched their heads for hours till I swapped them back.

10. If im really obnoxious,
cat /var/mail/username
>>/var/mail/username
blame the duplicate mail on restoring a backup.

Add your own

[Tom Dawson]

Eeewwwwwuuuu...you're mean!

I respect that in a person!

[John Poff]

Shannon,

I have only two things to say to you:

1. Your list is totally unprofessional and devious.

2. You are my hero! The BOFH lives! :)


When I first got into Unix, I was working with a real, super wizard. To help get me up to speed one day, he moved my home directory and symlinked it to a filesystem named 'found+lost' just to see how long it would take me to notice. He also changed the root password on our admin box and he wouldn't tell me what it was until I could tell him three different ways to tell that my home directory was really a symlink to another filesystem [without being root]. I'm glad he wasn't giving me swimming lessons! :)



JP

[Shannon Petry]

Just wanted to add that I will be assigning points when I get to a browser other than my Solaris NS6 which wont let me select points from the pulldown.

More points will be awarded for your own stories and pranks.

ps
greesymouse is my favorite. I have had people looking everywhere including under their desk for the cause of the problem.

[H.Merijn Brand (procura]

I've got only two rules.

1. You don't get any help if you're parked on my spot
2. You're out forever if you lie about fatal mistakes

And of course the silly aprilfool jokes. Last year I replaced ls with a perl script that generated dir (remember DOS) like output.

[Chris Wilshaw]

As far as the killing users goes, I used to set up their profiles so that I could just touch a trigger file in /var/adm/syslog of their ID. If that file existed, it would sleep for a number of minutes between 5 and 10, then kill off their shell. Of course, they didn't have access to check the contents of /var/adm/syslog (even if they'd known that it existed), so they couldn't really understand what was happening.

Other faves

Windows! Used to set up the security on peoples systems so that they couldn't close down Windows, run any program that wasn't already on their desktop etc.

Also set up a job so that when Windows started, it ran a "utility" called Sheep - this had the unfortunate effect of allowing up to 5 sheep to wander round their screens, falling from windows, eating plants etc, and generally slowing down their system.

using mt to eject tapes each time they were put back in.

using a screen sharing utility which allowed you to "assist" them typing in passwords.......how many times do you think someone will try to su before they ask you about it? 5? 10? 20 or more? 1 poor guy went through reboots, keyboard swaps, keyboard mappings, whole PC swap, and still didn't give up.

changing keyboard mappings
...to confuse the non-touch-typists, just move the keys around a bit
...to confuse the touch-typists - use a utility to actually re-map the output.
...the ultimate. Use a font editor to change EVERY keyboard character to a space (or any character you choose). Space is best - especially if they know about stty.....

[Chuck J]

I was working on a system and the developer complained to his manager that he wanted no one logged in, so I logged out then executed:

# remsh host.dom.com /usr/sbin/shutdown -hy 0

As if he deserved a reboot after the shutdown so he could just continue on working.

Chuck J

[Simon Hargrave]

Easiest and most fun has to be running xkill on someone's X workstation. Watch in joy as the user kills the window of their choice ;)

Sending a 'wall' message saying the server is going down now and that they must log out instantly, but not shutting down!

Replaced the 'cc' command once with a script that created an executable that simply core dumped every time. The fun I would have watching developers scratch their head as to why the bug-free code they'd just written was core dumping!!!

[Tom Maloy]

One creative person used to send sound files to the desktop (Sun) systems. Nothing like being on speakerphone in a large conference call and hearing a toilet flush!

[Simon Hargrave]

That reminds me, another fun thing (but not really sysadmin related).

When at 6th form college we had Acorn Archimedes machines. We were asked to be present during an open evening for new students. So, I wrote a daemon to sit on a machine at the front which used the *SAY speech command to speak any text sent to it. I then sat at the back, minding my own business, watching school leavers have a conversation with the magical talking computer at the front!!!!

[Chris Wilshaw]

Another cruelty to try - give them a 20 character password. (very few of them will know that only the 1st 8 matter)

Tell them not to have it written down.

Check their desks at random, and confiscate/destroy the password if you find it.

[Paula J Frazer-Campbell · Accepted solution]

Hi

Not computing but -

I sent letter to Officer Commanding B Coy to inform him that the accomodation of his soldiers was built upon a WW2 nuclear waste dump and that he had to arange to have three coast of red lead paint applied to all of the ground floor.

His Sergeant Major guessed it was me and kept the ruse up for a week.

Also whilst in the army I requested that all mircowaves be turned on at a particular time to check the total microwave radiation output.

Paula

[Shannon Petry]

For Military, I was in an air calvalry unit, supporting Cobras and UG-1's to be replaced by Blackhawks and Apaches a bit after I was there.

We used to get the new troops on day long campaigns searching for the following items.

1. can of squelch
2. 20 yards of flight line
3. 1 gallon of rotor wash

I alsu used to grab charged capacitors out of circuits and toss them to people to catch.

[Tom Jackson]

Hi:

No sys admin tricks. But office humor surfaces in other strange ways.

I work with a bunch of stinky guys that have fun calling each other and leaving farts on voice mails.

Don't leave you PC without locking it in our office area. Someone might send love letters from your ID to your boss or co-worker(s) the gay stuff is always humorous.

We also have an Oscar Meyer weiner whistle that we sometimes blow to ward off evil spirits.

I need a baby sitter. Anyone available??

Tom

[Kelli Ward]

My favorite sneak is to manipulate a user's CDE Desktop profile with the most obnoxious color scheme I can come up with, then remove their write permissions to the profile.
They change Desktop, back work along like everything's hunky-dory, logout, log back in in the morning and BOOM! My ugly scheme is back and they're head spins around.
Simple and harmless, but fun.

It's even better when the user doesn't know UNIX very well and comes to you with these odd symptoms. "Hmmm, I'm not sure, I'll check it out and get back to you." Go in, change the permissions back and tell them I couldn't find anything wrong with their system.

Happy Holidays!
Kel

[Christopher McCray_1]

Shannon,

You forgot the chem-light batteries, having them check for the "weak spots" in the armor on APCs and tanks, sending them to the motor sergeant for a can of blackout drive fluid.

Chris

[Steven E. Protter]

Prior admin had a user that liked to bypass an important driver program to do testing.

It made his tests go faster but caused sysadmin a lot of issues.

He figured out how to trap it and return the following ouput.

Follow the rules Rich

the progarm still exists, though Rich and the prior admin has retired.

Now it says, "Follow rest procedures."

[Steven E. Protter]

Caught a telnet user breaking out his login script with ctrl-c

Fixed that an added a message to her .profile(I didn't know it was a girl okay?) Someone just told me user id got a dollar prompt hitting these keys.

"Big Brother is watching. Never use the Ctrl-C or control-break key combination. All keystrokes are logged."

Poor girl tried to quit, thought the computer was doing a HAL-9000 on her. Hmm HAL-9000, HP-9000 Coincidence?

Needless to say, that's the last time I did that. HR was not amused with me.

Steve

[harry d brown jr]

One night, while on call in a Pick shop (the old R83 - Ultimate), I got a call from a user that had a GFE (basically a database file got wacked). Being a newbie to the environment, I called my backup for help.

The next morning I come into work, logged in and received the exact same error our customer had (that GFE error). I guess my backup person thought I was a total newbie!

Two hours later he shows up to work, and logs in. I hear him laugh, then about ten seconds later he yells out oh shit, and you can hear him madly typing and banging on his keyboard.

I had modified his login so that I could reciprocate the GFE jesture, but I got a little carried away: I disabled his break key, paused 10 seconds, then produced random GFE's with very valid address space numbers - giving it that REAL EFFECT - THat's when he swore and panic'ed. It took him about three minutes to figure out I had toasted him back!

Of course he never tried that stunt on me again :-)

live free or die
harry

[Martin Johnson]

I have a Sybase DBA who is so use to using Sybase that he automatically types in a command then types in "go" to execute the command. This works fine in sybase, but unix gives an error for the command "go".

I wrote a script called "go", when it executes, it writes the following output:

going...
going...
gone!

It's amazing how often he runs this script!

:-)
Marty

[Mike Fisher_5]

.

[Steven E. Protter]

It has been made clear to me if I ever do anything like what I've just read, I will be seeking other employment.

However in the dark days of my predecssor, the rules were different.

We had a user/programmer that didn't enter the testing environment properly. Didn't like the extra step.

Sometimes his test results came out funky.

My esteemed predecessor developed a method to detect it and display a message prior to booting him.

"Follow the rules Rich"

Every once in a while in the bad old days, our startup screen, which is a bunch of letters arranged to look like the Hebrew Word for Peace, Shalom would change.

It would say:

Welcome to the Department of Defense Top Secret Information System. Unauthorized use will be prosecuted.

Not one complaint or help desk call.

SEP

[Steven E. Protter]

Please ignore my latest post.

I thought I looked for prior posts and did not see my name.

How embarassing.

SEP

[doug mielke]

It's always fun to script setting monitor colors to balck on black for a few seconds, then back to normal.


But my alltime favorite, ( not in production, and more of an attack at DBA's, other admins, etc ) is to change the time zone abbr.

Bob is DBA, Change abbr to dum_bob.

Watch bob change it back, ha ha.

Then show bob some of the logs that track time zone, such that bob is imortalized for the life of the log.

[Shannon Petry]

Not here enough any more to assign points consistantly.