HDTenEightyP/NetNews huggingface dataset:
From: alan@edstar.ucsb.edu (Alan Moses)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin,comp.sys.sun.admin
Subject: Re: Admin/User Ratio
Date: 16 Oct 92 13:21:33 GMT
Followup-To: comp.unix.admin
Organization: UCSB Graduate School of Education

In <1992Oct15.164359.2895@zia.aoc.nrao.edu> rmilner@zia.aoc.nrao.edu (Ruth Milner) writes:

>In article <1992Oct14.211908.17756@srg.srg.af.mil> mjarriel@atria.srg (Michael Jarriel x4751) writes:
>>I am looking for statistics or ratios that correlate
>>users to system administrators in a Unix based network.
>>
>>10:1 20:1: 50:1 or such.  

>I think what counts more is the ratio of *systems* to administrators....

My impression is that in a lot of academic settings, there's a
large area where 'pure' system adminsitration and user support
services overlap. (They certainly do here!) I define my job more
in terms of users than systems, because until I advertise
services and arrange for training and support, the tasks I
perform as a sysadmin are irrelvant.

By the way, I'm at about 40:1 for either systems or users,
unless you add in the grad students using my systems via our
lab and dialup, which puts me above 100U:1.

- Alan

Alan Moses
Graduate School of Education		alan@edstar.gse.ucsb.edu
UC Santa Barbara   			UCSB PROFS: AMOSES 
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-9490  		Voice: (805) 893-8031
From: gah@zoo.bt.co.uk (Geoff Hopson)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: THANKS (was: How do I stop an annoying user?)
Date: 15 Oct 92 09:16:07 GMT
Reply-To: gah@zoo.bt.co.uk
Organization: BT Laboratories

Thanks to all who replied. The "annoying" user had found out the root 
password for the NIS server, and was a naughty lad. This password has 
now been changed, and the user formally reprimanded.

Apologies for the "long lines" in the original post, and the 
implication that all system admins are male. Rage had blinded me.
The castigations were well deserved.

I have taken the security recommendations on board (COPS, CRACK etc),
and our system admin will be implementing them soon.

Geoff
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
From: russells@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz (Russell Street)
Date: Tue, 13 Oct 1992 01:42:45 GMT
 <1b5s2fINNbc1@agate.berkeley.edu> <1992Oct12.233524.13463@pony.Ingres.COM> <1992Oct13.003448.16726@pony.Ingres.COM>
Organization: University of Auckland, New Zealand.

rca@Ingres.COM (Bob Arnold) writes:
>	9) It's a lot less painful to learn from someone else's experience
>	   than your own (that's what this thread is about, I guess :-) )

With out trying to wander off the thread tooooo much ... In my
experience the best experiences to learn off are your own :)
I wonder how many stories we have got so far about "I will never
type rm -r /" as root. (And no I have not done that _yet_, but
the day will come :()

I guess it is like the line from the science labs "I have all my
data. I just have to analyse it. I will do that at home" :)

--------------------------------------------------------------------
Russell (sync; sync; sync; halt) Street (russells@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz)

Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
From: ark@s1.gov (Alene Kercheval)
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories
Originator: ark@s1.gov
Organization: Lawrence Livermore National Lab
Date: Thu, 15 Oct 1992 19:11:18 GMT


In article <1992Oct14.000507.9232@trebor.uucp>, root@trebor.uucp (Bob Stockler) writes:
|> jimh@pacdata.uucp (Jim Harkins) writes:
|> 
|> >One of the great ironies of our time is that voters with brains are
|> >greatly outnumbered by voters without brains, yet somehow the
|> >intelligent fail to perceive that not everybody thinks the way they do,
|> >thus they fail to argue persuasively for their points and then are
|> >surprised when the majority makes dumb choices.
|> 
|> Is this original, and do I have to assign credit when I quote it ? ? ?
|> 
|> The same thoughts occurred to me in 1948 when Harry Truman beat Tom Dewey.
|> 
deleted stuff
|> 
|> Similar thoughts occurred to me at the time, and time to time thereafter.
|> I think Harry Truman's Korean Police Action (it was never given the status
|> of being called a "war") was just as bad a mistake as the Viet Nam thing
|> (foisted on us by Presidents Kennedy and Johnson).  (Why are all of these
|> things begun when people of that party are in presidential office?)
|> 
|> Disirregardless, I have faith in the American electorate (and juries, etc.).

Eisenhower sent the first troops to Viet Nam.
They were called Military Advisors.

	Alene Kercheval
From: fitz@wang.com (Tom Fitzgerald)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: temparary superuser
Date: 8 Oct 92 05:29:30 GMT
Distribution: usa
Organization: Wang Labs, Lowell MA, USA

> gary@sci34hub.sci.com (Gary Heston) writes:

> > Do *not* experiment without permission. 

mmt@RedBrick.COM (Maxime Taksar) writes:

> I disagree.  Experimentation is often the only way to get a
> good knowledge of things like Unix.  It can also be the only
> way to find obscure problems.

Would-be students are welcome to buy their own systems.  Even on a system
which has been bulletproofed to the limit of the admin's abilities, there
are still things that can break.  "main(){while(1)fork();}" will always do
interesting things.  We've got systems here that can be panicked by a user
program, but we can't upgrade the OS because the applications that run on
them would stop working.

What's just as bad, harmless experimentation can make your account look
like one which has been cracked and is being used as a staging area for
further attacks.  It does bad things to my blood pressure to see a
dialed-in user process running "find . -print | xargs egrep -i password",
even though it's likely to be cd'd into the news filesystem.  All sorts
of things can set off security alarms on systems paranoid enough to have
them.

-- 
Tom Fitzgerald   Wang Labs       fitz@wang.com   "I went to the universe today;
1-508-967-5278   Lowell MA, USA                   It was closed...."
From: barrie@calvin.demon.co.uk (Barrie Spence)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Date: 13 Oct 92 16:54:41 GMT
Organization: DataCAD Ltd, Hamilton, Scotland

In article <1992Oct13.014245.24930@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz> russells@ccu1.aukuni.ac.nz (Russell Street) writes:
>rca@Ingres.COM (Bob Arnold) writes:
>>	9) It's a lot less painful to learn from someone else's experience
>>	   than your own (that's what this thread is about, I guess :-) )
>
>With out trying to wander off the thread tooooo much ... In my
>experience the best experiences to learn off are your own :)
>I wonder how many stories we have got so far about "I will never
>type rm -r /" as root. (And no I have not done that _yet_, but
>the day will come :()
>

My mistake on SunOS (with OpenWindows) was to try and clean up all the
'.*' directories in /tmp. Obviously "rm -rf /tmp/*" missed these, so I
was very careful and made sure I was in /tmp and then executed
"rm -rf ./.*".

I will never do this again. If I am in any doubt as to how a wildcard
will expand I will echo it first.

Barrie
-- 
Barrie Spence                      DataCAD Ltd, Caird Street
barrie@calvin.demon.co.uk          Hamilton, Lanarkshire ML3 0AL, Scotland
	Telephone +44 (0) 698 425599 / Fax +44 (0) 698 419173
From: jfc@athena.mit.edu (John F Carr)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Date: 12 Oct 92 17:19:39 GMT
Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology

In article <djd.718900643@reading> djd@csug.cs.rdg.ac.uk writes:

>dipshit# chmod -r 664 /etc/*

>Everything was OK for about two to three weeks, then the machine went
>down for some reason (other than the obvious).
>The booting procedure was unable to run fsck,

Your OS must run /bin/init instead of /etc/init.  If init isn't
executable the system will hang or panic and reboot forever.

--
    John Carr (jfc@athena.mit.edu)
From: fischer@iesd.auc.dk (Lars Peter Fischer)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Date: 12 Oct 92 00:40:45 GMT
	<1992Oct11.125310.6158@osnbe.Olivetti.ch> <166.18511@incc.com>
Organization: Mathematics and Computer Science, Aalborg University


>>>>> "Jerry" == Jerry Rocteur (jerry@incc.com)

Jerry>  Moral: be *very* careful of find execs, get the syntax right!!!!

Yup. Use "find <whatever> -print" and look at what you get. If it
seems reasonable, add " | xargs <whatever" at the end. -exec is slow
anyway.

/Lars
--
Lars Fischer, fischer@iesd.auc.dk | It takes an uncommon mind to think of
CS Dept., Aalborg Univ., DENMARK. | these things.  -- Calvin
From: kevin@sherman.pas.rochester.edu (kevin mcfadden)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Date: 15 Oct 92 16:46:41 GMT
Organization: University of Rochester


Me and my co-system admin were in the process of repartioning a drive
so that we could allocate more space for incoming mail.  We had
just finished backing up our Data directory from which we were going
to take 10MB from.  Next step was to to actually repartition it which
includes formating.  Anyway, it comes time to give a device name
and we do a df to see which one.  To make a short story long, there
was a /dev/sd2g and a /dev/sd3g, one which was 300MB of stuff we
could delete and the other was 600MB of applications.  We confused the
the two and accidently formatted the 600 MB of applications, which
of course had been backed up......a month ago.  It could have been
worse.  

	BUT WAIT!!! It did.  Turns out it took 3 or 4 tries to get
the partition size correct (what the hell is it with telling it
how long it is in hex or whatever?).  It was at this point where
I started to cover my eyes and wander around the building because
we only found out the partition didn't work after spending 3 hours
restoring the applications.  4 * 3 = 12 hours to repartition!
From: pd@x.co.uk (Paul Davey)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: X11 / TVTWM Challenge
Date: 7 Oct 92 13:04:36 GMT
Organization: Not a lot
X-Disclaimer: This is not the views of IXI Ltd unless explicitly stated
X-Copyright: The author asserts the right of paternity.

>>>>> On 6 Oct 92 11:18:10 GMT, dbrillha@dave.mis.semi.harris.com (Dave Brillhart) said:

Dave> I am running X11R5 and TVTWM. In my ".xsession" file, I fire off
Dave> a number of applications when I start X. 

Dave> QUESTION (Challenge): How do I add to the environment that these
Dave> auto-started applications inherit?

Dave> Specifically, I'd like to add "EDITOR = /usr/local/bin/emacs" to
Dave> the environment. 

Read your environment into the .xsession file like this Method 1)

#!/bin/sh
# .xsession
. $HOME/.profile
# normal startup
xterm &
twm &

What's that - you still use csh? 
	(Me too 'til ksh is shipped everywhere).

OK try the alternative Method 2):

#!/bin/csh -f
# .xsession - csh version
source $HOME/.cshrc
source $HOME/.login
# normal startup
xterm &
twm &


If you also login via a tty, .login etc. needs to work out if you are
on a tty or an X display.

I use an alternative (I don't like csh scripts, or use the same shell
everywhere) - method 3):

#!/bin/sh
# .xsession
xrdb $HOME/.Xdefaults
# set an environment variable XLOGIN as a flag
XLOGIN=1
export XLOGIN
# start xterm with -ls (login shell option)
exec xterm -ls -geometry  80x24+0-0  -T "LOGIN" -n "LOGIN"

This first xterm sets up its environment and then it starts other
clients.  

So in my .cshrc after my normal setup we have: 

  if ( $?XLOGIN ) then
    unsetenv XLOGIN
    # set a local csh variable for my critical shell
    set ignoreeof
    twm &
    xcutsel -g -112+35 & 
    xconsole -geom 400x70-0-0 &
    xclock -g 100x100-0+0 & 
    xmodmap -e 'clear lock' -e 'add control = Control_L Caps_Lock'
    xsetroot -cursor_name X_cursor -fg red ; 
    xset bc &
 endif 	# XLOGIN

This could be in .login or .profile or .bash_profile, syntax
translation is left as an exercise for the reader.

--
		     Regards,				
			    Paul Davey			
					
		 "These are interesting times"	

  **	  IXI	         	Internet: pd@x.co.uk		**
  **	  Vision Park   	UUCP:     pd@ixi.uucp		**
  **	  Cambridge        	Bang:     ...!uunet!ixi!pd	**
  **	  CB4 4ZR       	Tel:      +44 223 236 555	**
  **	  United Kingdom	Fax:      +44 223 236 550	**
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
From: weave@bach.udel.edu (Ken Weaverling)
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Organization: University of Delaware
Date: Sun, 11 Oct 1992 23:34:22 GMT

A friend of mine called me up saying he no longer could log into his 
system. I asked him what he had done recently, and found out that he
thought that all executable programs in /bin /usr/bin /etc and so on 
should be owned by bin, since they were all binaries! So he had 
chown'ed them all.

-- 
Ken Weaverling (Delaware Tech College) weave@dtcc.edu -or- weave@bach.udel.edu

"Is it too late to change the way we're bound to go? Surely one of us must know"
			-- Sandy Denny,  1948-1978
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin,comp.unix.programmer,comp.unix.misc,comp.sources.testers
From: berstel@mipsmath.math.uqam.ca (Bruno Berstel)
Subject: Found current size of window
Followup-To: comp.unix.programmer
Reply-To: berstel@lacim.uqam.ca (Bruno Berstel)
Organization: Universite du Quebec a Montreal
Date: Fri, 16 Oct 1992 19:40:15 GMT

Hello,

Several times lately I have seen posts from people asking for a way of
determining the size (# of lines and colums) of a window. Since I had this
problem too (many times the size is 0 0) I have been trying several hacks
for one year. None was fully satisfying, but now I have found something.

My problem is that it is so simple that I wonder why I didn't see it posted.
Thus I'm afraid I missed something. I would be glad if someone could point
out was might be wrong in the following code (if anything is).

The principle is to leave the termcap routines do the job, as the man page
for tgetent(3x) says :
     tgetent() extracts the entry for terminal name into  the  bp
     buffer, with the current size of the tty (usually a window).
So all the following program does is get the termcap entry for the current
term, which (the entry) will contain the current size of the window; then
extract the number of lines and columns from it and print them. Note that
since the current size of the window is always prepended to the termcap
entry by tgetent(), it doesn't really matter to get the right termcap entry.

Yours,
  Bruno.

------------------------------ cut here ------------------------------
/* Compile with -ltermcap.
   On RISC/os 5.0, be sure that /usr/svr3/usr/lib/libtermcap.a is used.
 */

#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>

main() {
  char entree[1024], *term;
  int li, co;

  if ((term = getenv("TERM")) == NULL) {
    fprintf(stderr, "Undefined variable TERM.\n");
    exit(1);
  }

  switch (tgetent(entree, term)) {
   case -1:
    fprintf(stderr, "Cannot open termcap database.\n");
    exit(1);
   case 0:
    fprintf(stderr, "Cannot find %s in termcap database.\n", term);
    exit(1);
  }

  if ((li = tgetnum("li")) == -1) {
    fprintf(stderr, "Cannot find number of lines.\n");
    exit(1);
  }
  if ((co = tgetnum("co")) == -1) {
    fprintf(stderr, "Cannot find number of columns.\n");
    exit(1);
  }

  printf("%d lines, %d columns.\n", li, co);

  return 0;
}
------------------------------ cut here ------------------------------

-----     -----     -----     -----     -----     -----     -----     -----
Bruno Berstel                                         berstel@lacim.uqam.ca
Laboratoire de Combinatoire et d'Informatique Mathematique       L.A.C.I.M.
Universite du Quebec a Montreal                                    U.Q.A.M.
(Tele)phone : (514) 987-8495                           Fax : (514) 987-8477
---------------     ---------------     ---------------     ---------------
                    Noel en hiver, Paques au printemps.
Xref: sparky comp.unix.admin:5635 comp.unix.sysv386:15577
From: measures@cse.uta.edu (Mark Measures)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin,comp.unix.sysv386,comp.unix.att
Subject: Postscript printer problem
Date: 14 Oct 92 18:18:14 GMT
Article-I.D.: utagraph.1992Oct14.181814.24675
Distribution: comp
Organization: Computer Science Engineering at the University of Texas at Arlington

A couple of weeks ago I posted a message about getting an AT&T
593 laser printer to work with my StarServer E, running SVR4.2.
The printer has a PDL (page description language -> postscript)
board in it that should make it work as a postscript printer.
I posted a message asking for help because I could never get it
to print.  By the way, thanks to those who suggested fixes.
It's nice to know people really do care to help when they can.

I'll describe the history, and maybe I can keep someone else
from going through the difficulty I've had.  And maybe someone
who knows the real solution to my problem can set me straight.
I would like nothing better.

I installed the PDL board in the printer and set it to PDL
emulation mode.  I ran the self test and everything seemed fine.
I have the printer connected to the parallel port on the Star-
Server, and the printer knows it's using the parallel port.

I added the printer using:

   lpadmin -p laser -v /dev/lp -T postscript -I postscript

I then enabled and accepted it.  When I would try to print,
though, the printer would display "Processing" in its status
window for a few seconds and then return to "Online."  No
output of any kind.

I fiddled with stty options for a while, tried to set the content
to "simple", and a few other things that were silly and useless.

I then tried to see if the printer would work at all, so I
changed the printer type to "hplaserjet" and set the printer to
HPLJ2 emulation mode.  I then tried to print /etc/motd, and,
voila!, it worked!

Elated with that success, I switched printer type back to
postscript, content type back to postscript, and printer emulation
back to PDL.  Then when I printed a file, I got postscript code.
That's when I posted my message.

The problem, I discovered to my embarrassment, was that when
I changed emulation mode back to PDL, I didn't turn the printer
off and then back on, so it was still doing HP emulation.  That's
why I got raw postscript code.

After working with it off and on for a while, I've come to the
conclusion that either AT&T's postscript filter is screwed or
that their PDL board (postscript board) for their laser printer
doesn't work.  So I'm running the printer as an HP printer and
it's working fine.

If anyone has an AT&T 593 printer with PDL board that you have
successfully configured on a StarServer running SVR4.2, let me
know.  I would love to find out where I went wrong.

Mark
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin,alt.folklore.computers
From: broberts@waggen.twuug.com (Bill Roberts)
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Organization: Brite Systems
Date: Sat, 10 Oct 1992 01:04:12 GMT

My most interesting in the reguard was when I deleted "/dev/null".  Of
course it was soon recreated as a "regular file", then permission problems
started to show up.

I was new at the game at the time and couldn't figure out what happened!
It look good to me.  I didn't know about "special files" and "mknod" and
major and minor device codes.  A friend finally helped out and started
laughing and put me on the right track.  That one episode taught me a
lot about my system.
-- 
|  Bill Roberts, Va Beach VA   |  In the field of observation, chance  |
|  broberts@waggen.twuug.com   |  favors the prepared mind. - Pasteur  |
From: robjohn@ocdis01.UUCP (Contractor Bob Johnson)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Date: 12 Oct 92 13:51:03 GMT
Organization: Tinker Air Force Base, Oklahoma

>Arne Asplem (aras@multix.no) wrote:
> I'm the program chair for a one day conference on Unix system
> administration in Oslo in 3 weeks, including topics like network
> management, system admininistration tools, integration, print/file-servers,
> securitym, etc. 
> 
> I'm looking for actual horror stories of what have gone wrong because
> of bad system administration, as an early morning wakeup.        

Management told us to email a security notice to every user on the our
system (at that time, around 3000 users).  A certain novice administrator
on our system wanted to do it, so I instructed them to extract a list of
users from /etc/passwd, write a simple shell loop to do the job, and
throw it in the background.  Here's what they wrote (bourne shell)...

       for USER in `cat user.list`; do
          mail $USER <message.text &
       done 

Have you ever seen a load average of over 300 ???

Bob Johnson, Systems Administrator
Tinker AFB, Oklahoma
From: djd@csg.cs.reading.ac.uk (David J Dawkins)
Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Subject: Re: WANTED: Unix administration horror stories !
Date: 12 Oct 92 14:37:23 GMT
Reply-To: djd@csug.cs.rdg.ac.uk
Organization: University of Reading

weave@bach.udel.edu (Ken Weaverling) writes:

>A friend of mine called me up saying he no longer could log into his 
>system. I asked him what he had done recently, and found out that he
>thought that all executable programs in /bin /usr/bin /etc and so on 
>should be owned by bin, since they were all binaries! So he had 
>chown'ed them all.

Oh you bastards. I was hoping that a thread like this would never
appear, because if it did, I knew I would have to confess. Oh well...

About a year back, I was looking through /etc and found that a few 
system files had world write permission.  Gasping with horror, I went
to put it right with something like

dipshit# chmod -r 664 /etc/*

(I know, I know, goddamnit!.. now)

Everything was OK for about two to three weeks, then the machine went
down for some reason (other than the obvious).  Well, I expect that you
can imagine the result.  The booting procedure was unable to run fsck,
so barfed and mounted the file systems read-only, and bunged me into
single-user mode. Dumb expression..gradual realisation..cold sweat. Of
course, now I can't do a frigging chmod +x on anything because it's all
read-only. In fact I can't run anything that isn't part of sh.
Wedgerama. Hysteria time. Consider reformatting disks. All sorts of
crap ideas. Headless chicken scene. Confession.

"You did WHAT??!!" 

Much forehead slapping, solemn oaths and floor pacing.

Luckily, we have a local MegaUnixGenius who, having sat puzzled for an hour
or more, decided to boot from a cdrom and take things from there. He fixed
it.

My boss, totally amazed at the fix I'd got the system into, luckily
saw the funny side of it.  I didn't.  Even though at that stage, I didn't
know much about unix/suns/booting/admin, I did actually know enough to NOT
use a command like the one above. Don't ask. Must be the drugs.

BTW, if my future employer _is_ reading this (like they say he/she might),
then I have certainly learned tonnes of stuff in the last year, especially 
having had to set up a complete Sun system, fix local problems, etc :-)

Anyone else got a tale of SGS (Spontaneous Gross Stupidity) ?

-dave "I'm much better now, honest.. no, really.. hey what's this button
doooooooooOOOOOO..."


-- 
djd@csg.cs.rdg.ac.uk
djd@csug.cs.rdg.ac.uk
davidd@integ.uucp
Xref: sparky comp.unix.admin:5477 comp.unix.ultrix:7504