Doom as a tool for system administration | Hacker News Reader

Doom as a tool for system administration

cs.unm.edu

I thought this would be about...

SNMP management is a damn fine tool for network computers, especially when it lets you reboot them remotely. I patch a game of Network Doom with sprites of the users' faces and get the kills piped to the SNMP reboot command...

I ring the users and tell them, to give them as much of a chance as you can get using the server copy of the game which only lets you pick up a handgun with one round of ammo. Still, a beancounter can get good at pistol shooting when two hours of spreadsheet work is at stake and you have to win a game in order to ungrey the SAVE button (another little patch).

By Friday, the results are in. Surprisingly enough, the NCs weren't a hit with the users and were replaced with PCs after only four days. Oh, and 327 kills...

http://bofh.ntk.net/Bastard_1998-1b.html

You guys do realize that this is from 1999, don't you? It was really funny back in the day but I though everybody knew this by now ;)

I thought that, but then I realised that people here, although all* hackers, have vastly different experience. I'm regularly seeing stuff that I think is old and obvious, and it's getting hugely upmodded, so I thought I'd share this "oldie but goodie". It's very entertaining, even though it is old.

* for some definition of "all".

Well, I appreciate it. I was 9 years old and had no idea.

Which shows that we're not dying out. Yay!

These kinds of things "respawn" every generation. Here's an older version of which I'm still fond: http://get.a.clue.de/Fun/advsh.html

beware of the deadly ``Wand of Emacs.''

"after I took the screenshot of myself being attacked by csh, csh was shot by friendly fire from behind, possibly by tcsh or xv, and my session was abruptly terminated."

Definitely my favorite part. I think the data modeling within the game engine still needs some work...

What struck me about the article was the attribution of the concept of cyberspace to Vernor Vinge instead of Gibson. After some wikipedia investigation, it's clear that my sci-fi history knowledge is lacking - True Names came out a full 3 years before Neuromancer.

However, Gibson is still credited with giving the name "cyberspace" to this artificial world (Vinge called it the "Other Plane"). I'm wholly disappointed with my sci-fi professor now for leaving out this bit.

"This work was funded by the National Science Foundation through a BIO Research Training Group in Ecological Complexity (NSF 9553623)."

Two favorite bits:

- Important processes can be instantiated as more powerful monsters. They can then defend themselves against inexperienced sysadmins.

- Certain processes are vital to the computer's operation and should not be killed. For example, after I took the screenshot of myself being attacked by csh, csh was shot by friendly fire from behind, possibly by tcsh or xv, and my session was abruptly terminated.

The question is: which windows process is most likely to become "the cyberdemon"? --> http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Cyberdemon

I'm going to go ahead and vote for "Outlook.exe"

Are there ninja monsters who disguise themselves to look the same as svchost.exe? And mysterious otherworldly processes with names made up of ever changing random strings of letters and numbers who cannot be killed by force alone?

Only on windows I guess.

Looks very cool. However, in the age of cloud computing, if you need to constantly look at "ps aux" on each server you run, you are doing it wrong.

This is awesome.

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