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Thread: Fun security thread

  1. #11
    Senior Member n01100110's Avatar
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    I believe the command enable gets you to priveleged mode on the cisco router, so yea i guess he could be right in a way, so it's not like it wasn't "working" I think he means he couldn't get it to priveleged mode so he couldn't configure it otherwise...
    "Serenity is not the absence of conflict, but the ability to cope with it."

  2. #12
    How's this for a funny story.

    The other day I was using a shitty keyboard (couldnt type fast enuf for msn) so i go to switch it to a better one thats just lying around the house. So i unplug keyboard #1. Plug in keyboard #2. This is while my computer is running. No one ever told me it wasn't good for your computer to do that.

    So this new keyboard isn't working. I sit there for a second kinda pissed off. Then i smell this burning computer smell. I think "awwww **** now what" (this computer is kinda falling apart). I turn it off and look inside. BLOWN CAPACITOR right beside the keyboard plug. (****)

    So now i have a choice to either buy a new board, chip, and ram. Or buy a USB keyboard. Either way its a pain in the ass.

    Hope someone gets a chuckle out of this. OH! AND learns not to switch keyboards while your box is running.
    No place like 127.0.0.1

  3. #13
    Senior Member
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    I turn it off and look inside. BLOWN CAPACITOR right beside the keyboard plug. (****)
    You can replace a blown capacitator (if you have a sodering gun. My brother used to make boards for a living so in turn I have had the pleasure of being able to see and practice on replacing such things as capacitators.)


    Funniest thing that happened to me recently was yesterday when I was writing one of our outsource programmers (he is new and I am head of tech dept so I need to keep everyone up to date) he told me that my boss (CEO of company) told him she by herself setup the entire internal network along with the website and portal....haha....she has a hard time printing let alone turning a damn machine on let alone...you get the point.

    Needless to say, I chuckled and watched a good 20min of some office space. Then walked over to her office and told her what I just read and politely laid a copy of the e-mail on her desk. She will feel like a crap!

    Adiz

  4. #14
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    Back in the olden days of computer repair, if you wanted to upgrade your processor you had to have a chip extractor. We had been working on 286's and such all day upgrading them to Kingston turbo chips.

    Chip puller, boom, boom, boom, one right after another. Turns out one of the ones i pulled actually had a ZIF socket. Whoops, bet that one wont work anymore. I felt like an idiot and still get made fun of to this day. And if any of you remember Kingston turbo chips thats been a while back!

  5. #15
    Senior Member RoadClosed's Avatar
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    Disk Duplicator From Hell

    When I first got my current position, I wanted to do something nice for the CEO because he was trying to work on huge spreadsheets on a fuzzy old 15 inch monitor and a 300 Mhz pc. So I procured the latest greatest number crunching little beowtch with a 20 inch LCD.

    I got my little external disk duplicator out. Hooked it up to the parallel port and cloned the thing over lunch so I would have a copy it clone to the new machine. So I get back and booted the old pc to check some old settings....

    NO Operating System Found. So I started sweating because he was over my shoulder. OMFG. I looked at the duplicator and someone had used it and switched the path so I just copied the blank disk inside the duplicator to my boss' PC!!!! If man get's any closer to a simultaneous heart attack, lung collapsing, brain hemorrhaging experience, that was it because he then went on to say he had 20 years worth of financial historical data on the PC and failure to recover that was "NOT an option"

    I had no idea, remember I was new here. Of course I said something to the fact that a critical error occurred on the read/write process and the hard drive failed do to “age” and “use” thrown in with a bit of bad timing, NOT that I had been a stupid ftwat that intentionally wrote over his data. Back peddling is a fine art form.

    It was pure luck that I was bored a few days earlier and wrote a batch to copy is data to the network one night. I was contemplating an upgrade so I made a backup the day I ordered the damn PC. Some of his data was missing after I got it all back up and I accessed his PC remotely and hand entered it. A little extreme but I am still here.
    West of House
    You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door.
    There is a small mailbox here.

  6. #16
    Just a Virtualized Geek MrLinus's Avatar
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    One of my favourites (albeit it a tad scary) was in 2001/2002 a client that I had consulted for. He had a nice ADSL line with his own home-built computer router (multi-homed machine). He was quite proud of this. He had built it himself. It was NT using SQL. On the SQL server was names, CCs info, etc. about the various clients he'd have. Most were VPs, CEOs, and other execs of some fairly large companies.

    He showed me where it was (hidden in a closet in the small office he had). When I asked him about firewalls, service packs, AV, etc. He looked at me puzzled.

    "It's NT! It's secure and protected!" he replied.

    I explained to him that it wasn't secure and that I'd probably need to update some things and need to setup a firewall (or two). I asked him for the password.

    "Password?" he asked. "It's NT. It's secure. I don't need a password. I just press enter".

    I nearly passed out. I did eventually get a firewall up, the router configured so it wasn't allowing EVERYTHING in (which of course had the default password of "password" for the login), changed the password to something stronger and patched up the whazoo.

    My other favourite was when I was an admin at a private school. Every semester I'd take on 3-5 students as "assistants". They'd help me with setups, installations and troubleshooting. For them it was a great chance to get some experience. I had one student who was helping me take care of setup for our evening classes.

    We used removable hard drives in the machines. All he had to do was pop in the drives into the appropriate machines, boot them to ensure they booted fine and check that the room was presentable. 10 minutes before the class starts he comes down in a panic.

    "OMG!!! One of the machines is broken! It won't boot! I tried everything! I blew on the contacts, I pushed it harder, I resetted the harddrive in the bay.. but it won't boot!" (for those who haven't used removables in a school setting, sometimes the removing and re-insertion can do wear and tear on connections so the smallest dust bits can be problematic. May or may not be true but sometimes blowing gentle on the contacts seems to work).

    I went up to the classroom with him as he continued to panic. I looked at the machine. I shut it off. I carefully removed the floppy disk that was in the floppy drive. I booted the machine.

    "Works fine", I said.

    "HOW DID YOU KNOW IT WAS A FLOPPY!?!? OMG! I feel so bad...."

    Hehe.. it only happens once in your lifetime when you forget about the data floppy in the disk drive..
    Goodbye, Mittens (1992-2008). My pillow will be cold without your purring beside my head
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  7. #17
    Elite Hacker
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    I hate the old data floppy in the floppy drive thing. They need to change the error you get at boot to say "There is a data floppy in your floppy drive idiot, please remove it!". With the error it gives me I always think that my harddrive failed, mostly because it is so old. I am always getting ready to do some drastic thing to the computer when I discover that there is a floppy in the drive. Also, has anyone ever plugged the mouse in the keyboard plug thingy and the keyboard in the mouse plug. I have, it took me like a whole day to figure out the problem. I had unplugged everything from the back to mess around in the case and when I plugged it all back in I didn't check which was which because I was sure I knew. I figured out the problem when I took the whole setup downstairs and replugged everything in. I knew the problem before I even started up the machine when I was replugging things in. Boy did I ever feel like an idiot.

  8. #18
    About three years ago my [former] company's email servers started passing around one of those Visual Basic-based email viriuses ("I love you"?). Most users opened and executed the file, so after pillaging their email address books I got multiple copies. Knowing what it was, but curious as hell, I opened it up in trusty Visual Basic editor to peek under the hood.

    So, sitting with my laptop on the floor by an airport gate, I start to disect this nastiness for kicks. Accidently change some code, and want to revert back to the 'original'. So, what do I do? Open up one of the infected emails and.. save it and open with the editor? No sir, just give the file a good 'ol double click! Duh. You can figure out what happened then..

  9. #19
    AO Decepticon CXGJarrod's Avatar
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    Back in the days of the 5 1/4 Floppies I went over to my parents friends house to see why a disk was not working in their disk drive. Turns out he stuck one of the 3 1/2 inch disks in the 5 1/4 drive. It took us an hour to get the disk out in one piece.
    N00b> STFU i r teh 1337 (english: You must be mistaken, good sir or madam. I believe myself to be quite a good player. On an unrelated matter, I also apparently enjoy math.)

  10. #20
    Does anyone else think this is all Geek humor? (lol just kidding)

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