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Re: Dumb question: How do you reboot?



On Fri, Mar 07, 2003 at 09:15:26AM -0500, Bob Paige wrote:
> Nathan E Norman wrote:
> >[ No technical content, just a funny story ]
> >
> >At a prior job, we had a bunch of servers in a datacenter.  Some of
> >the datacenter people liked to play with the keyboard; one of them was
> >convinced that the only server OS in the whole world was Windows NT.
> >He liked to try to log into Windows NT servers (some of the servers
> >that were running NT had easy passwords, I guess).
> >
> >One day this fellow discovered MY servers.  The console screen didn't
> >dissuade him; he just hit ctrl-alt-del to get a "login screen".  Sigh.
> >Unscheduled downtime.
> >
> >Shortly afterward, /etc/inittab had this entry:
> >
> >ca:12345:ctrlaltdel:/bin/echo "Nice try, dumbass"
> >
> >And yes, the datacenter guy eventually disappeared.
> >
> > 
> >
> Isn't this a good example of why _not_ to have ctrl-alt-del reboot the 
> system?

In a non-physically secure environment, yes!  However, it has utility
for desktop folks.

It wasn't that big a deal to make the change, and in fact I was
embarrassed it was a problem in the first place.

Of course, you still have the problem of power switches, power cords
... what happens if someone unloads a double barrel 10 guage into the
rack, etc.  If you can't trust the people working in your datacenter
...

Anyway, this is drifting off topic :-)

-- 
Nathan Norman - Incanus Networking mailto:nnorman@incanus.net
  THEY planted The Lone Gunmen to MIND CONTROL the public into seeing
  TRUTH SEEKERS as CONSPIRACY NUTS.



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