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Comment by guessbest | Hacker News Reader

I was amazed by this paragraph, "Shortly thereafter, someone came running into the room and ... was worried about an attempted breakin."

Just think of a Network Administrator doing this every time there was a root login attempt that failed. They'd get a lot of exercise these days, that's for sure.

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The reason probably was that this was highly unusual. There was no flood of break-in attempts from the Internet and the absolute majority of students usually have no curiosity and are only using such servers for lab assignments.

This reminds me how my first unix account at college was locked by sysadmins during the first day. I only knew "cd" and "ls" at the time... :)

What harm did you cause with cd and ls??

As far as I know, I didn't cause any harm. From what I heard, the sysadmins didn't like the floppy drives making noises on their Solaris x86 server.

I saw it happen in 2004. The University of Bristol has some strange options on their machines, such as home directories being globally readable unless you change it yourself (failure to do so isn't a defence if someone plaigarises your work), but the strangest one I saw was the total lack of ulimits on shared machines.

Every time someone tried to su the IT staff would show up and ask them what exactly they thought they were up to. That went a long way to instilling the idea that you shouldn't mess about doing things you shouldn't on communal hardware.

> such as home directories being globally readable unless you change it yourself

Also the case at University of Birmingham. Must be a default somewhere

At Durham University in 2000, "net send hello" at a Windows command prompt caused a message box to appear on every Windows computer on the uni network. I gave myself up to the bewildered IT department immediately.

Reminds me off my early days of discovering Unix commands. Except this was on my first job in a Bank running SCO Unix; a decidedly less forgiving environment than a University. I was the unofficial assistant sysadmin (long story) and running banner "hello"|wall in the middle of a busy day at the branch caused a fair bit of confusion. Thankfully we were a young bunch and sysadmin let me off with a somewhat stern warning.

Really? In my experience most devices don't allow password-based root login attempts to the world at large. Either they're only accessible via some sort of privileged network, or they're only accessible with a key.

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