h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I work in an engineering firm, so of course quite a large number of engineers are big "Dilbert" fans. In our area we regularly have discussions about cartoons and, if we think they somehow apply, then we stick them up by the department coffee machine so that our whole area gets to see them.

Failing that, if any member of management gets caught in am embarrassing or silly photo we copy it, stick it on the wall, and have an anonymous caption competition! I sit fairly close to the coffee machine, just close enough to hear the various exclamations of the victims......

One that's quite good to play on the newbies is to open every CD drive in the office at once remotely. Easily done for a network of linux machines using a simple oneliner, if the permissions on the machines are set up correctly.

sh -c 'for i in mach1 mach2 mach3 ; do rsh -n $i eject & done'

AEndr

You can also do this on a MS network using "Computer Management". Another funny one is net sends to non-computer people. Something along the lines of "You have attempted an illegal function. The police have been notified."

If you have Lotus Notes then one simple thing to do with the internal e-mail system is the creation of buttons. Send some unsuspecting person a relatively straightforward message and put the button as the response (such as 'press this button if you're coming to the Christmas party') but set up the button to do something completely different. The original version of this was to send an e-mail round the office asking anybody if they wanted a cup of tea, but you can use it just about anyway you want. Do it subtly enough and you can create all sort of havoc without the person knowing what they're doing...

For research purposes...

I'd love to know how to do this with a Windows network through computer management. It works fairly well in Linux but I'd be interested learning how for standard PCs...for research purposes, after all.

Tex-

If you're on a Win2K network you do it through computer management or disk management (for messing with disk drives or rebooting someones puter)... however you'll need administrator priveleges I believe.. for net sends you may not need a management tool. You can try it from a command prompt on a willing cohort to see if they get it...

Ahh... net sends... I love those things.

The truly malicious and geeky amongst you can write a batch file, with an infinite loop around a NET SEND command .

For more information on WTF net sends are, type NET SEND /HELP at the command prompt.

Example:
NET SEND [uname] This computer has been scheduled for a regular maintainence check. Please save all open documents, then hold down the computer's power button to put the computer in maintainence mode.

And you wonder why my sysadmin hates me

Metaki (hacker-student-)

Now that's proper use of net sends...