more unix jokes

[David H. Brierley]

Most people that have worked with computers (all kinds, not just UNIX) for a
while will probably have a favorite story about fun things you can do to other
peoples prompts.  UNIX people tend to have more of them because UNIX seems to
emphasize changing your prompt.  I have two favorite stories in this area:

1. At one point we were running all of our terminals on ethernet based terminal
   servers.  One of the units developed lots of problems and while we were
   waiting for the problems to be fixed we shuffled things around so that the
   operations staff was all using the flaky unit (we didn't have enough units
   to just pull the thing out).  Having a flakey unit gave us an idea to play
   a joke on one of the other members of the operations staff so we reconfigured
   his terminal so that his network disconnect sequence was the same as his
   login id.  Whenever he tried to log in to any of the machines, the network
   would disconnect him.  It took him several hours before he realized that
   the problem was isolated to him and that it was not the terminal server
   going flakey again.

2. Recently, another member of the operations staff decided to play a similar
   joke on yet another member of the staff.  We now have all of our terminals
   connected using a Micom port selector so he changed the other guys prompt
   to be "HOST: " and then set up a bunch of command files using the names of
   all of the local hosts and had them produce various error messages like
   "ALL PORTS BUSY", "UNAVAILABLE", and "NO RESOURCES ASSIGNED".  With the
   addition of an echo command to the .profile that said "DISCONNECTED", the
   poor guy was convinced that the port selector had jammed up and wasn't
   letting him connect to any of the hosts.
-- 
David H. Brierley
Home: dave at galaxia.zone1.com   ...!rayssd!galaxia!dave
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