Computer Stories (bloopers)

I decided this topic should have its own thread as started by Cmd_Spook in the thread "when enemies become friends".

Day 1 "The Prank"

Well last year it was my junior year in High School. http://www.shs.springfield.k12.il.us/
And ya know how you have this major term paper thats worth like 300points or something. Anyway, our class went down to the Mac lab to work on them. They then connected us to the school server and that was pretty spiffy for example when I made a document titled "Zak_is_Fag.txt" and saved it the whole class could see it and that was pretty cool. Well being a dumbass I decided I would put an encrytion code on this Zak kids paper and when the diolog popped up I typed in "123456" and hit enter and it started this encryption process. I left that class feeling very good about myself.


Day 2- "Total ****ing Chaos"

That morning I overheard some webdesign people talking about a security breach I didn't think much of it and went on my way. When my 4th hour Literature class came up I was about 15min late. When I entered the room everyone started laughing and booing at me and the teacher looked down upon me and told me to get my ass to the computer lab. When I got there, there was about 8 webdesign people huddled around a computer and the admin motioned me to come. It so happens that when I pulled that little stunt not only did it encrpyt that one guys paper, but around 3/4's of the entire junior class. She sat down with me and said "Look, you wont get into any trouble if you just tell me what the ****ing password is, okay?" I agreed and had to sit down there for about 40min so they could figure it out. After this incident people would goto the teacher and state that they had it finished, but what I did caused not to be all the way completed. I made a lot of friends the following week. Then the rumors started.
The main one was that I had "Hacked" into the school server, did that encryption thingy and then made the password "Zak is a Fag". Thats pretty much it though. What are some of yours?

One time I was working on an open case computer in my bedroom with the power on. I dropped one of the alligator clips in by accident and it made a connection. Needless to say I never did that again.

Also, back in grade school I thought I was a super user considering that I was one of the 3 kids who knew anything about computers in the school. Me and a friend were designated the school techs. We were installing software on a library computer and I had the bright idea to edit the autoexec.bat. I made it so it would echo my 3 initials and something like "rules!" or something after it. There was so much running that I thought no one would ever see it. That very same afternoon our computer teacher called my house saying she spotted it. I ended up getting a detention for "Improper use of the library facilities" and ended up getting my tech-ship revoked. Oh well. I was getting bored changing the settings so you could use backspace on All The Right Type for everyone.

I think the worst one blooper I've had was when needed a boot disk to use on a computer I was using for an networking practical exam. I couldn't find my standard one *some bastard had pinched it*, so I just grabbed one out of my bag without checking what disk it was... 45 minutes remaining of a 3 hour test... and I stick a DOS Boot Disk in which has been configured to boot.. and then remove all partitions on the hard drive.... I wasn't very happy... luckily, the teacher was stupid and believed me when I said my hard drive made a grinding noise when I turned it on, and then everything was gone...

I changed a few commands in Autoexec.bat one of which I forgot the closing \. GGGGGRRRRRRRRRRRRRR......... Thank god you guys taught me how to boot to the safe mode.:shocked:
Oh, by the way, superb avatar, there shmoo.

go here I did this my junior year.
Also back in junior high I was the teacher assissant for the computer teacher. He logged on as system admin and told me to put in new students into the system. When he walked away I created an administrator account for myself. Later I logged back on as my admin account and created a techer acount and an extra admin one in case they found the first one. with the teacher account I created my own classroom links, all of the links were games. I added all my friends to this classroom do they could goto the link instead of getting the escape code and haveing to type it in mannualy.

Nobody but my friends knew I had this access. I also learned that if you send a message using the seesion prgram to make sure you are sending it to the right person.
By the end of the year I had full access to all teacher, administrator and student files.:D Also during that year we got a brand new server that my teacher gave me to play with. That was cool.

This isn't a blooper exactly. i was in a peripherals class and we were installing windows 95 on four 386's. Anyway all the computers failed to start up after we installed windows. We ended up quiting and reinstalling windows 95 on those machines about four times over before someone realized that this wasn't right. Since we were installing w95 from floppies we decided to go ahead and virus check all of them, and virus check our machines. We found nothing on the installation disks, but all of the machines were infected with this pesky thing called "JunkyBoot". We couldn't figure out where it was coming from until we decided to scan the disk we were using to partition the drive. Anyway we looked stupid for 2 days trying to figure this one out.

Back in my last year in high school (senior year) about a century ago :( I was playing with some Turbo Pascal programming (fear the pascal!! :p ) Anyway, we all had our awesome 386 25MHz computers with *gasp* 4 MB of RAM, we were rockin' We could play Doom on these bad boys!! Anyway, our Windows for workgroups (yuck) machines were networked via Novell IPX, file sharing, print sharing, blah blah, you know the routine.
Our file server had a unheard of 2GB HDD in it, wow was this school high tech or what!! Well after learning some pascal coding, we soon got to the juicy stuff like open files for read/write. Now back to the school computers, everyone had usernames and unlimited space on the file server (shared of course) I think we call these profiles nowadays, not sure. Well the computers depended on that one Novell file server for everything like desktop settings, etc. One day during class, I got this bright idea. I'll make a program that just writes junk text to one file over and over and over and over forever. It would even count up how much space it was wasting, pretty clever eh?
Hmm, what would happen if I ran this on the file server, well after an hour it filled up the HDD with a 1.8GB junk file that started to do bad things. After it reached it's max, for some reason it starting writing over other files. Soon the whole server was hosed and when this happened, it killed every workstation in the school (win 3.11 likes to crash alot). Needless to say, no one ever found out I did it until after I graduated and told the teachers. When word got around, the rumors were flying about how I hacked into the school network and took out the computers. Actually that isn't what I intented to do, but oh well I'm a legend in my own mind :D

Well I graduated from HS (thank god!), anyway one day me and my friends where playing around on the computers in the library. The school had used some lame litte security in a box program to try and "secure" the computers. So i was showing my friends how you could use WINDOWS HELP to open up the control pannel (great security huh) well while the little (wannabe) black hat bastards where setting the screensaver to "David likes dick!" and password protecting them, I started playing around with the card catalog system. We dicided that we'd better book before we where late to class. The next day we where going into the library to do our usual bit of indoor anarchy when the security guard stoped us and usherd us into the head office. Well it turns out they didn't appreciate me rigging the card system to print 1200 copys of a search for all books with "a". =) they had to shut the server off to stop it. My friends told them that I had told then to mess with the screensavers (like i said bastards). I got banned from the library for half a year and 4 hours detention. It took them 3 weeks too fix the computers (these people are educating our children), I could have trained a chimp to fix them in 30 min.

Like you guys i was branded a "hacker" but all my teachers, the librarian made sure they all knew what happend. Oh well, small price to pay to make a school sysadmin cry =)

In high school, I got from the third year off programming in Turbo Pascal. Since I was the only one who allready knew the language, I had a great chance to watch and laugh. Anyway, after a couple'of weeks the teacher knew what I was into, since in that period I was beginning to write progs in ASM, of which he obviously didn't knew ziltch. One day he asked me how it was going with ASM. I said that I had some difficulties because I didn't have a decent compiler and MASM failed on a couple'o things. He then asked me wether or not I was using a clone. I was very surprised by this, but I answered I had a clone, to which he replied: " Oh, but then it's easy!", whereafter he told me that clone's their motherboards have ASM functions disabled. I couldn't stop laughing anymore and eversince he tried to make me fail tests. Luckily for me, I've allways had 100%. ;)

Anyway, since he tried to let me fail, I did something really *nice* for him. On the last day on high school, I put forth a DOS-batch virus, self-written. When the next schoolyear started, I learned from some guys I knew from lower years, that he's been busy for three weeks making the local network work again. It took him 'bout a week to find out something was going on, because suddenly no PC could connect to the network anymore. He had a nice job reinstalling 300 PC's and five servers. He should've known better then to make a geek angry on him. Obviously, he totally wasn't geek-like. :)

Although this wasn't a blob, I had my laugh.

Grtz,