The Datafile PD-CD 3/PDCD_3.iso/utilities/utilsd/document/!Document/Documents/UnixWars

Text File | 1991-09-17 | 23KB | 403 lines

                                Unix Wars
                                =========

 A long time ago, at an installation far, far away.....

 It is a time of intra-system war, as forces of the user alliance struggle
to break the iron grip of the evil admin empire. Now, striking from a hidden
directory, they win their first victory. During the battle, user spies manage
to snarf source of the empire's ultimate weapon; the dreaded "rm-star", a
privileged root program with the power to destroy an entire file system at a
keystroke. Now, hotly pursued by the empire's sinister audit trail, princess
la36 races aboard her shellscript -- custodian of the stolen listings that
can save her people and restore freedom and games to the network.

  As we enter the scene, an admin multiplexer is trying to kill a user ship.
Many of their signals have gotten through, and RS232 knows that a core dump
is imminent. They have scant microseconds to fork off a new process and put
Megabytes of virtual space between themselves and their implacable foes.
His companion, 3cpu, follows him only because he seems to know where he's
going.

  "Oh, i just know I'm going to regret this! " cried 3cpu as he followed
RS232 through the access pipe. Quickly rs232 closed the read end and
execl'd, and their new craft detached itself from the burning shell of the
ship.

  The admin commander was feeling quite pleased with the progress of the
attack when his xo called out.   "Another process just forked, sir.
instructions? "

  "Hold your fire -- that last power failure must have caused a trap through
zero. it's not using any cpu time, so don't waste a signal on it."

  A short while later the infamous Lord Vadic himself strode through the
still-smoldering wreckage of the user ship, followed closely by a nervous
commander.  "We can't seem to find that data file anywhere, Lord Vadic.
Perhaps it was deallocated when."
 "What about that forked process?" vadic growled. "it could have been
pausing, holding a channel open. If any links are left I want them removed
or made inaccessible. search the entire system at nice-20 until it is found!"

  Meanwhile, the two droids' tiny process dove headlong towards the only
nearby disk.  "Are you sure you can ptrace this thing without aborting it?"
queried 3cpu. "its relocation bits were almost all stripped during the
attack, and I never was any good at patching binaries."
As rs232 was about to reply their process reached its endpoint and
terminated abruptly, dumping them in the midst of a large unallocated region
on the unknown volume. Many random seeks later they trudged up to the
looming wreckage of a deallocated I-node.  "Shelter!" croaked 3cpu, but
rs232 had barely begun to emit a nack when a horde of dwarfish code
fragments swarmed out of it to overwhelm them. They had been captured by
glitchas.

  Enter luke vaxhacker, bartering with the glitchas for replacement parts
for his uncle. They tried to sell him 3cpu, but the 'droid didn't know
protocol for an 11/40 under rsts, so Luke would need some kind of conversion
hardware.  "How about this little rs232 unit? " said 3cpu "I've interfaced
with him many times before and he's excellent at keeping his bits straight."
Luke was pressed for time, so he took 3cpu's advice. The glitchas wanted to
barter some more, but the three left before getting swapped out.
rs232, however, wasn't the type to stay put without retaining screws. He
promptly scurried off into the empty disk space.  "Oh, great!" said luke
"He'll probably map himself into a bad block somewhere. I guess we'd better
go after him."
  Hours later the two traced him the home of old pdp-1 kenobi, who was busily
running a diagnostic on the little rs unit. "Is this droid yours? His status
registers are stuttering and someone's done some odd things to his interrupt
lines. Leaving something like this on-line is just asking for downtime --
but I think I may have him fixed for now."
  Later that evening, during a futile attempt to interface rs232 to kenobi's
asteroids cartridge, luke accidentally crossed the small droid's cxr lead
with his initiate remote test. A projector crackled to life, casting a
hologram of a young lady with her hair done up like twin danish pastries
imploring help from some general os/1 kenobi. "Darn," mumbled luke "I'll
never get this asteroids game worked out."
  "Why, that's the princess!" 3cpu said.
Luke peered at the image critically. "No, that's a modified steinburg dither
with anti-aliasing. nice sculpted surfaces."
  Kenobi interrupted luke with a frown.  "Luke, this message changes things.
listen." Kenobi seemed to think there was a possible threat to luke's #home.
If the admin troops were indeed tracing this 'droid, it was likely they
would more than just charge for cpu time.  They sped off to warn luke's kin
(taking a relative path) only to find a vacant directory.
  "Take your father's bytesaber, luke." Kenobi said. "you will need to learn
the ways of the source now."
  "The source ?" luke queried, wide-eyed.
  "The source -- the cosmic template of the system, within which all
knowledge and power can be had. But you must always beware of the dark side."

  Later, after a short skim across the surface in luke's flying read-write
head, pdp-1 had them stop at the edge of the cylinder containing
/usr/spool/uucp.  "Unix-to-unix copy program" said pdp-1. "you may never see
a more wretched hive of bugs and flamers. We must be cautious."

   As our heroes' process entered /usr/spool/news it was met by a newsgroup
of admin protection bits.  "State your uid!" Commanded a burly syscall.
"we're running under /usr/guest" said luke. "This is our first time on the
system."
  "Let's see some temporary privilege bits, please."
  "Uh."
  "This isn't the process you are looking for," kenobi said softly. "we can
go about our business."
   Several bits momentarily pulled low.
  "You're free to go about your business. Mov along now!"

  Pdp-1, luke and the droids made their way through a long and tortuous
nodelist (.!musocs!micomvax!philabs!linus!husc6!rutgers!cbmvax!snark) to a
dangerous netnode frequented by hackers and only seldom polled by the
minions of admin. As luke stepped up to the crossbar pdp-1 went in search of
a suitable server.

  Luke had never seen such a collection of device drivers. Long ones, short
ones, ones with stacks; EBCDIC converters, local-net handlers, crt drivers,
routines for archaic printers. A cat interface twitched pointed ears at him.
 "#@&*%$$#@ :><?><," transmitted a particularlsy unstructured piece of code.
 "He doesn't like you." Decoded his coroutine.
 "Er.sorry." replied Luke, beginning to backup his partitions.
 "I don't like you either. I am queued for deletion on 12 systems."
 "I'll be careful." luke said nervously.
 "You'll be deallocated!" snarled the coroutine.
 "This little routine isn't worth the overhead." murmered pdp-1 kenobi,
overlaying into luke's address space.
 "This little routine isn't worth the overhead." repeated the coroutine
dazedly.
 "%#%#@$&%&*&*&%#$$%%&%#@#@$%(*&#%!" encoded his companion as it attempted
to overload kenobi's segment protection. With a stroke of his bytesaber
kenobi dyked out the offending code. The coroutine retreated hurriedly.
Kenobi turned to luke.  "I think I've found an i/o handler that might suit
us.
  "The name's con sole0" said the routine next to pdp-1. "I hear you're
looking for some relocation."
  "Yes indeed." said pdp-1 "If you've got fast enough hardware. We must get
off this device."
  "Fast hardware? the milliamp falcon has made the arpagate run in less than
twelve netnodes! Why, I've even outrun cancelled messages. It's fast enough
for you, old version."
  "fast hardware?" said luke unbelievingly "that thing is a paper-tape
reader!!"
 He might have grown up in an out-of-the-way terminal cluster where the
natives only spoke BASIC, but he knew an asr-33 when he saw one.
 "It needs an fia conversion at least." sniffed 3cpu, who (as usual) was
trying to do several things at once. Lights flashed in con sole0's eyes as
he whirled to face the parallel processor.  "I've switched a few jumpers.The
milliamp falcon