Comment On slammer.SCR

Hey - he could have saved a lot of effort and made each running screen saver install itself on at least one other computer on the network so that he only needed to install it once.

Oh, hang on...

Each JPG was about 3MB,

Hmm, from 1996, so let's assume 1024x768, so at a generous 32bpp, that's ..carry the 2... 3.1MB of raw data. Either bc has failed me or something is fishy.

Oh wait, I'm missing the point, you say?

So, is this because the deployment instructions were poorly written, or because the Atlanta office was too stupid to follow directions?

If it's the first, then I agree there's a WTF.

If it's the second, then it's just business as usual in our field...

Er.... 1000 workstations on a token ring? like... a single token ring? Like, the token would be passed through 999 workstations before a comp would get to speak again?

Why on Earth would a Houston oil firm be so pro-Olymic that they'd waste money getting a developer to write an Olympic themed screen saver?

This is a classic example of 'assumption is the mother of all f*** ups.'
He assumed everyone would be smart enough to copy the images before pointing the screensaver at them, they didn't and everything got f***ed up.

Moral of this story: Never assume, because it makes an ass out of u and me.

:P

(Although, if everyone *had* copied the images, that would also bomb the network.)

WTF is a "frizbee"? A bee with really bad hair?

Perhaps you forget how much available cash oil companies have?
Or perhaps you don't realize some IT shops are really loose and open to "fun" ideas like this. I created a screen saver for the last company I was at, just because they wanted one /w their logo on it.

Zylon:

WTF is a "frizbee"? A bee with really bad hair?

A plastic disk you throw through the air for fun, like an AOL CD.

a thousand workstations in the Atlanta HQ on a 16MB token ring connection

That's the real WTF.

Olly was actually Izzy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Izzy_%28Mascot%29

Points out the fact I've struggled to make bosses understand. Even the smallest and seemingly "easy to implement" features must be completely unit and integration tested, and may cause days if not weeks of unanticipated work for soemthing that no one really even cared to have in the first place.

Oh Shit!!!

How did this guy explained to his bosses what have happened? There are so many ways this guy was going to get b... f...ed

First one, you're a dev and can't even make a screen saver work?
Second, why to a network drive?
Third, documentation? What is that?
Fourth... profit... jajajajaja

CAPTCHA: yeah! This dude probable got a good bathe when he got home, you know, the sweating and stuff.

BTW, Firefox's speel checker rox!

Ubersoldat:

BTW, Firefox's speel checker rox!

Probable and bathe are both words... just not the correct ones.

Devi:

Zylon:

WTF is a "frizbee"? A bee with really bad hair?

A plastic disk you throw through the air for fun, like an AOL CD.

There's nothing funny about an AOL cd! How do you think all those lamers got on the internet? Is that your idea of fun? Coz it sure aint mine!

DaveK:

Devi:

Zylon:

WTF is a "frizbee"? A bee with really bad hair?

A plastic disk you throw through the air for fun, like an AOL CD.

There's nothing funny about an AOL cd! How do you think all those lamers got on the internet? Is that your idea of fun? Coz it sure aint mine!

"Coz" stinks of a closet AOL "user" to me.

You should never use AOL CDs as Frisbees.
Never!
Use them as Coasters for your mug of tea instead.
Or as dartboards.
Or to re-shingle the house.
Or tie them on a piece of string and use them as a wind chime.
etc...

Bah. Anyone can bring down a 16 MBit token ring network over lunch.

I brought down a GigE ethernet network over lunch back when GigE cost big bucks.

I remember it well -- I was an intern working for a big contractor who was working for a big government organization. It was also "Take your child to work day" -- and the head of our building security had brought his son (who was roughly the same age as I was) in for the day. "Show him something neat over the network" the security chief says, before wandering off to lunch.

So, we instant message a friend of ours who is interning with the security department (which controlled security for the whole center, not just our building.) Text messaging to the center was, of course, disabled -- but the computers all ran X windows fully enabled. So "instant message" in this context is opening an edit window on someone else's computer.

Well, we use this ad-hoc IM network to set up a video feed from his workstation's camera, and ours. We have ourselves a little live video chat back in the days when these things where "the next big thing" instead of mundane. Lunch ends, and we forget all about our little link.

Except there's one problem. Connecting our building to theirs was a router that had been configured, for reasons no one ever explained to me, to be a broadcast router. Every IP packet it recieved went to every downstream workstation. The same worked in reverse. And we where sending a live video stream over this . . . essentially to every computer on the center (thousands) -- which were all broadcasting back "we don't want your video packets" -- which in turn, where broadcast to every computer on the center -- which in turn... you get the idea.

Over the video chat, we see the following unfold:

*The security building personnel return casually from lunch.

*The security people check the indicator lights on all their racks of equipment.

*The security people fly into action, shouting about Denial of Service attacks and begin tracing the attack

*The security people ask the room if anyone knows which computer IP ***.***.***.*** is. Our intern friend points to the machine next to his (running our video link) and, while pointing, hits the key to kill the transmission. Our feed goes dark.

We all had a great laugh a few days later when all this came to light.

Yea for some reason I remember the mascot being called Whaizit or something completely assinine like that. Or Whatzat? Something like that.

Denial of Screensaver attack: brillant!

akatherder:

Ubersoldat:

BTW, Firefox's speel checker rox!

Probable and bathe are both words... just not the correct ones.

Well, "preperations", "ceromony", and "frizbees" are not words. It's "preparations", "ceremony" and "frisbees".

obediah:

Each JPG was about 3MB,

Hmm, from 1996, so let's assume 1024x768, so at a generous 32bpp, that's ..carry the 2... 3.1MB of raw data. Either bc has failed me or something is fishy.

Well, either they were BMPs rather than JPGs, or they were at a very high resolution so they'd still look nice when printed out as a poster - which would be perfectly resonable for promotional stuff like that.

Jon W:

a thousand workstations in the Atlanta HQ on a 16MB token ring connection

That's the real WTF.

In 1996? Not at all. 100 MBit Ethernet was only released in 1995, so that 16MBit network was probably effectively three times as fast as what most other companies had at the time (since Token Ring holds up much better under heavy load than Ethernet).

El Supremo:

Why on Earth would a Houston oil firm be so pro-Olympic that they'd waste money getting a developer to write an Olympic themed screen saver?

Methinks this has been anonymized.
My question, if this happened now, would the Olympic committee immediately sue? I think for canada winter olympics, they've trademarked nice words like 'winter' and 'games'
http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/04/02/business/olympics.php

I hope not. I remember 'Izzy, the Whatizit', http://www.espn.go.com/oly/summer00/s/2000/0915/745509.html
it was horrible. They should have paid anyone who wanted to use it.

TheFeshy:

Bah. Anyone can bring down a 16 MBit token ring network over lunch.

I brought down a GigE ethernet network over lunch back when GigE cost big bucks.

...

Except there's one problem. Connecting our building to theirs was a router that had been configured, for reasons no one ever explained to me, to be a broadcast router. Every IP packet it recieved went to every downstream workstation. The same worked in reverse. And we where sending a live video stream over this . . . essentially to every computer on the center (thousands) -- which were all broadcasting back "we don't want your video packets" -- which in turn, where broadcast to every computer on the center -- which in turn... you get the idea.

Bah. You didn't bring down the network; the guy who misconfigured the router did. Get your own screw-up to show off!

spiderx:

akatherder:

Ubersoldat:

BTW, Firefox's speel checker rox!

Probable and bathe are both words... just not the correct ones.

Well, "preperations", "ceromony", and "frizbees" are not words. It's "preparations", "ceremony" and "frisbees".

Frisbee is trademarked. "Frizbee" refers to a generic flying disc.

Rich:

My question, if this happened now, would the Olympic committee immediately sue?

Probably not if it was a big sponsor doing it internally. Heck, if it was an internal thing, then the Olympic committee probably wouldn't sue anyway as they wouldn't find out.

That reminds me of the time a very expensive clustered Solaris 2 system (this was in 1993 or so) was totally brought to its knees in an untraceable way through "interesting" network behaviour.

There were 3 or 4 big chunky systems in the cluster, each with lots of filestore which they exported (via NFS; these were innocent times) over a private network to the other machines in the cluster. Unfortunately, there was a loop in the directory hierarchy on one of the machines (which may have had something to do with how things were mounted). We found this out when we did a recursive find (as you do when curious) on one of the other machines in the cluster, which proceeded to chase around the loop very quickly. Now, on the system that was running the find, the load was virtually nothing. Alas, on the machine hosting the looped filestore, this was not true.

As I noted earlier, these were big chunky machines (the one with the WTF! in the filestore was one of the earliest high capability multi-CPU systems; this was why we were using Solaris 2, since SunOS4 which users liked just couldn't effectively utilize the hardware) that were shared by very many users across the university I was at, and so it was normal for the machines to have a load in the 5-15 range. The loop changed that. I believe the highest confirmed value for the load was on the order of 750, but sampling was so poor at that stage that who knows what the true load was? (Some of you young 'uns will not know what Unix load is: it's the number of processes that are currently waiting to execute, as opposed to being blocked for some I/O.)

Once we'd figured this out, we killed the find. It took a fair while for everything to return to normal. But the Real WTF at the back of all this was that the sysadmins never worked out what caused the problem; the NFS server was in the kernel, and so activity wasn't logged and there was nothing noticeable on the system that triggered the failure. We were generous though, and didn't misuse our new-found powers: while bringing a big system to its knees is fun the first time, after that it's just annoying (especially as where do you think our email was delivered?)

Using Token Ring in a corporate network in 1996 is not a WTF; but using a SINGLE Token Ring topography for a thousand workstations IS.

I was in middle school (aka "junior high") in the suburbs outside of Atlanta when the 1996 Olympics came. I still remember that mascot. IIRC, they designed the mascot, then had a contest to come up with a name. Apparently, most everybody's response was "what is it?" so that got shortened to "watsit" (something like that) and, finally, to "Izzy."

Why do I recount this history? So that I may say that the mascot is, quite literally, the real WTF.

The "ohno second" is the term you are looking for. It has a proud history along with the "mobile ohm".

(So glad my physics teacher isn't around with his horrible puns any more.)

Fantastic :]

One of the mascots for the Sydney 2000 Olympics was Olly the Kookaburra...

The real WTF here is that the developer WAY over-engineered his little screensaver application. Why he did make it so configurable when all the customer wanted was to display a static set of given images? He should have compiled the images into the executable and this never would have happened.

I was giving software support to a client with an NT server, and they commented that it kept getting very slow. Every time I went to look at it as a favour, the problem went. It baffled me, but they were happy every time I was there, but would comment later that my fixes hadn't worked.

Finally on of the lawyers at the firm twigged - the 3D screensaver was killing the CPU. He's probably the guy who put it on in the first place, so I suppose that it was fair he solved it too.

AC:

The real WTF here is that the developer WAY over-engineered his little screensaver application. Why he did make it so configurable when all the customer wanted was to display a static set of given images? He should have compiled the images into the executable and this never would have happened.

It's one of those cases where over-engineering is easier. It takes all of about four lines of code to list the contents of a directory in Windows, while compiling non-bitmap images into an executable takes real work.

Sounds familiar. Back at the power station I've mentioned in earlier posts we had two offices connected by a 2MB/s connection (this is around 2000). It was decided we would move to a SOE with all user documents were saved on the servers. Ordinary users had no write access to the local drives so the implementation team (which grew from a 1 person 3 month project to an "oh my God!" that eventually dragged in the entire dept to get it up and running) figured that users roaming between the offices would be ok.

It all tested out in small groups and got permission to go live. Soon the complaints started; logon for some users would take up to 30 minutes and throughput on the WAN had crashed. A little investigation turned up two problems. Users found they could save items to the desktop, we found entire CD images copied to the desktop, all faithfully saved as part of the profile and dragged up the WAN at logon. Another, HR induced, idea had been the screensaver of "helpful" company information. it was written in house and the programmer hadn't considered the effect of all the screen savers kicking in after 10 minutes and pulling all the uncompressed BMP images from a single server, across the WAN.

Rootbeer:

Using Token Ring in a corporate network in 1996 is not a WTF; but using a SINGLE Token Ring topography for a thousand workstations IS.

Well, it can't be a single ring, since the limit for Token-Ring was 260 nodes on a ring. Much more likely is that there were some reasonable number of individual rings for the workstations, bridged or routed together, but the problem was that the server had only a single 16Mb TRN connection, so all the traffic eventually ended up on the server’s ring.

What a disgustingly racist story. This WTF has reached a new low.

cer-E-mony, not cer-O-mony.

WTF.

This story reminds me of something I saw on our network this year.

We monitor the traffic on our network with MRTG. During working hours, the 5-minute average on a link from the core switch to a departmental switch usually stays below 1 Mbit. With some really heavy file transfers we can see peaks of 5-10 Mbit. Then one day, one department's link goes to 60 Mbit and stays so for hours. On investigating the departmental switch, we discover it's only one PC generating all the traffic.

Some kind of evil attack? Never-before-seen virus infection? User gone crazy?

No.

There was a network directory with hundreds of high-resolution photos, and it seems that Windows Explorer in all it's user-friendliness tries to generate thumbnails of these and refreshes this thumbnail view quite often. It didn't quite manage to "bring down the network", but I imagine that 3 machines looking at this network directory simultaneously would do it.

Moe:

What a disgustingly racist story. This WTF has reached a new low.

?

The exact same thing would have happened if they had used a third-party solution.

Control_Alt_Kaboom:

You should never use AOL CDs as Frisbees.
Never!
Use them as Coasters for your mug of tea instead.
Or as dartboards.
Or to re-shingle the house.
Or tie them on a piece of string and use them as a wind chime.
etc...

Personally, I put it on the fishing string and hang it onto my mother´s vineyard. Scares mynah birds away from vinegrapes quite effectively.

This reminds me of high school.

Specifically, two things:
1: I wrote the school a screensaver, which they liked enough to install on all the pcs and continued using after I left.
2: I also wrote an instant messenger, which used files on a network drive for communications. It brought down the server, due to having no delay in it's "check for new messages" loop, and being installed on 100+ pcs.
The program itself was in the same network drive, so after deleting it the problem went away, and I had to spend a week going round removing shortcuts to it from pcs startup folders.

Why did you need to remove the shortcuts from the pcs?

Just replace the file with a 'program' that does nothing.

Anonymous!:

Why did you need to remove the shortcuts from the pcs?

Just replace the file with a 'program' that does nothing.

Why replace it with a program that does nothing? Replace it with a program that deletes the start-up shortcut.

vertagano:

Anonymous!:

Why did you need to remove the shortcuts from the pcs?

Just replace the file with a 'program' that does nothing.

Why replace it with a program that does nothing? Replace it with a program that deletes the start-up shortcut.

Actually the IT tech removed the program, blocked my access to that public folder, and wouldn't listen to my suggestion to put a program that deletes the shortcut in instead.

Removing the shortcuts was effectively my punishment.

Thief^:

vertagano:

Anonymous!:

Why did you need to remove the shortcuts from the pcs?

Just replace the file with a 'program' that does nothing.

Why replace it with a program that does nothing? Replace it with a program that deletes the start-up shortcut.

Actually the IT tech removed the program, blocked my access to that public folder, and wouldn't listen to my suggestion to put a program that deletes the shortcut in instead.

Removing the shortcuts was effectively my punishment.

The punishment at my high school for messing with the computers would have been a complete technology ban. Be thankful the tech was careless enough to trust a kid who had just caused serious network problems to have access to every machine on the network once again to fix them, and you only lost privileges to one folder.

vertagano:

Be thankful the tech was careless enough to trust a kid who had just caused serious network problems to have access to every machine on the network once again to fix them, and you only lost privileges to one folder.

It probably was the same tech which previously agreed to installing the comunication program on all the PCs. So it's easy to know he was careless...