Wherin A Typo Means the Difference Between A Single System and the Entire Domain

[crashhelmet]

A couple of years ago I worked in IT for "Big Brown Delivery Company." They have specific servers that run specific jobs for each of their Hubs. Some of these servers can only be accessed by one person at a time and this can become a problem when we need to fix things.

We were getting reports of problems with an application on one of these servers but every time we tried to log in remotely to fix it, we were told that someone in another building was already logged into it. After getting this message for over an hour I decided to send them a message over the network using a DOS command. It's simple to use and works great... or at least, usually is.

The command is called NET SEND and the syntax is simple. Type net send <computer or user> <your message>, just without the <>.

So I typed in net send computername There is an issue with servername that we need to resolve Please log out for 5 minutes thanks - IT

Well, that's what i intended to type in. Instead of the message going to the intended computer, the computer's name popped up on every system in the domain. Every computer on the network, nation wide, had computername pop up on their screen.

I immediately went to my supervisor and started apologizing profusely. I could imagine someone in some other department start freaking out thinking we were hacked or sumthin and the fit hitting the shan. THANKFULLY they were cool about it and simply told me to not do it again

CH

[Akasa]

When working tech support I would mess with my team members using net send. They could never figure out who was making the messages appear on their computers. The IT guy was a friend of mine and he thought it funny as hell.

[Lingering Grin]

Only problem I can see with using Net Send like that is that it was WAY too easy to just turn off.

There's a good chance the person would never even get the message.



Oh just remembered a funny story though. few years ago, one of my roommates was goofing around with net send, and decided to play a joke on our other roommate. Who happens to be a little religious (Christian). He was also locked away in his room at the time.

So my roommate changes his computer name to 'God' and uses net send to send my other roommate a message that said "Stop touching yourself!"

Few seconds later we hear "WHAT THE HELL!?" as a little message box pops-up on his screen that says:


Message from God:

STOP TOUCHING YOURSELF!

[Jetfire]

I play Everquest, and am one of the Community Leaders, who have official and semiofficial side channels to talk to the Dev's. This happened back in the days when we were 'just' Community Summit members (a program that predated the current CL program), before EQ switched over to the current Universal Chat system.

Some of the Dev's and CL's were hanging out in our usual channel, and we were talking about a variety of commands the Dev's had available to them. One of them mentioned was /amsg, and we were all wondering if that was locked out to the Dev's on the Live servers or not.

So, after a lot of daring and chiding, we finally got one of the dev's to give it a try, and suddenly in EVERY custom player made channel on the live servers at the same time, people saw:
<DevName> tells <channelname> "Hello" (or something like that. )

In our own channel, we were roaring, laughing at the reactions we saw as confused players asked across channels WTH was going on. (and I'm sure more than a few embarassed people who just had a Dev say "hello' in very private channels too. ). The Dev himself had to log off and back on with a new char to escape all of the /tells he was getting.

Since then, we still try to dare a dev in repeating the message, but none will. Plus EQ's switched over to a new chat system that's shared across ALL of SOE's games, so the range of /amsg is a lot greater now; I doubt a lowly dev account would be able to access /amsg on that. But we still dream of the day we can talk a dev into repeating that stunt.