Linux

I assume most of those students weren't "officially" given admin priveleges, which makes it extra funny

Little known fact: A Stanford mainframe kept logs of the activities of the 'wheels' in a journal -- the 'journal of the wheels'. Young George Lucas, who briefly attended the university, found that journal, and became fascinated with the 'Wheel Wars'. He later drafted a document that he called 'Journal of the Whills', based largely on what he read on those logs; this is the draft that later became 'Whill Wars', and ultimately, of course, 'Star Wars'.

The best part of working in a meat grinder startup were the Linux masters teaching you stuff like

cat /dev/random > /dev/pty23

or

su _otheruser_
chsh -s /bin/false

In my freshman year of computer science our main computer lab was filled with Sage IV machines. Basically a Motorola 68k series with 4 or 5 serial terminals. Most people were writing Pascal code or using a simple word processor. But god forbid you were on there with someone taking assembly language. Because they could write really stupid code with super tight loops that never allowed any other code to run, and the only thing you could do was reboot. So if you hadn’t saved your code you were fucked.

So I never purposely wrote really bad code that would overwrite unprotected shared memory with random quotes from Marvin from HHGTG to mess with other people. I would never do that. That would have been unethical and shit… 🤔

I did learn a lot of basic hardware and operating systems though so there’s that.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sage_Computer_Technology

In my town's school classes during Covid lockdown were held in Microsoft Teams. But there was a severe lack of IT knowledge. In the beginning, for some reason all participants ended up with moderator rights, so kids kept kicking the teacher out of their lecture.

I remember back in college we would abuse the wall command on our shared Linux server so much that IT had to disable it

I've always wondered why the admin group is called wheel

Reminds me of the "Op" wars on IRC. All users would be given @ status and the point was to kick everyone before you got kicked. Writing scripts for this was my first "taste" at programming.

Reminds me of the test server shenanigans I had at an old job versus a colleague. All in fun. Nothing in production.

One was the faux Bash shell that kind of worked OK until you pushed it or tried to do anything fancy. It was the default shell for the user called "root", but that wasn't the UID 0 user. It had been, but I renamed it. Then created a new "root" with a different UID. Of course, the faux shell would tell "root" that it was UID 0.

The other was the simple background loop that would detect any rival admin sessions and SIGHUP their shell process. First user on the box to run that pretty much had free reign, and everyone else was logged off instantly.

Why declare a war over it? Just sudo sed -i 's/%wheel/$(whoami)/' /etc/sudoers or smth like that

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wheel_(computing)

got a similar situation in MUDs, someone finds a way to frob everyone else up to wizard level and the whole round of the game just becomes a mess of shouts

$ usermod -G wheel lntl

i think that's right