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DEC WARS! (Fwd. from inet-access)
Now... Who has UNIX Wars?
Forwarded message:
> From: Avi Freedman <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: IPv8
> To: [email protected]
> Date: Fri, 6 Sep 1996 17:32:30 -0400 (EDT)
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> A long time ago, on a node far, far away (from ucbvax)
> a great Adventure (game?) took place...
>
>
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>
>
> It is a period of system war. User programs, striking from a hidden
> directory, have won their first victory against the evil Administrative Empire.
> During the battle, User spies managed to steal secret source code to the
> Empire's ultimate program: the Are-Em Star, a privileged root program
> with enough power to destroy an entire file structure. Pursued by the
> Empire's sinister audit trail, Princess _LPA0: races aboard her
> shell script, custodian of the stolen listings that could save her people,
> and restore freedom and games to the network...
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
> As we enter the scene, an Administrative Multiplexer is trying to
> kill a consulate ship. Many of their signals have gotten through, and
> RS232 decides it's time to fork off a new process before this old
> ship is destroyed. His companion, 3CPU, is following him only
> because he appears to know where he's going...
>
> "I'm going to regret this!" cried 3CPU, as he followed RS232
> into the buffer. RS232 closed the pipes, made the sys call, and their
> process detached itself from the burning shell of the ship.
>
> The commander of the Administrative Multiplexer was quite pleased
> with the attack. "Another process just forked, sir. Instructions?"
> asked the lieutenant. "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."
>
> "We can't seem to find the data file anywhere, Lord Vadic."
> "What about that forked process? It could have been holding the
> channel open, and just pausing. If any links exist, I want them
> removed or made inaccessable. Ncheck the entire file system
> 'til it's found, and nice it -20 if you have to."
>
> Meanwhile, in our wandering process... "Are you sure you
> can ptrace this thing without causing a core dump?" queried 3CPU
> to RS232. This thing's been stripped, and I'm in no mood to try
> and debug it." The lone process finishes execution, only to find
> our friends dumped on a lonely file system, with the setuid inode stored
> safely in RS232. Not knowing what else to do, they wandered around
> until the jawas grabbed them.
>
> Enter our hero, Luke Vaxhacker, who is out to get some
> replacement parts for his uncle. The jawas wanted to sell him 3CPU,
> but 3CPU didn't know how to talk directly to an 11/40 with RSTS, so
> Luke would still needed some sort of interface for 3CPU to connect to.
> "How about this little RS232 unit ?" asked 3CPU. "I've delt with him
> many times before, and he does an excellent job at keeping his bits
> straight." Luke was pressed for time, so he took 3CPU's advice, and
> the three left before they could get swapped out.
>
> However, RS232 is not the type to stay put once you remove
> the retaining screws. He promptly scurried off into the the deserted
> disk space. "Great!" cried Luke, "Now I've got this little tin box
> with the only link to that file off floating in the free disk space.
> Well, 3CPU, we better go find him before he gets allocated by someone
> else." The two set off, and finaly traced RS232 to the home of
> PDP-1 Kenobi, who was busily trying to run an icheck on the little
> RS unit. "Is this thing yours? His indirect addresses are all goofed
> up, and the size is all wrong. Leave things like this on the loose,
> and you'll wind up with dups everywhere. However, I think I've got
> him fixed up."
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Later that evening, after futile attempts to interface RS232 to Kenobi's
> Asteroids cartridge, Luke accidentally crossed the small 'droid's CXR and
> Initiate Remote Test (must have been all that Coke he'd consumed), and the
> screen showed a very distressed person claiming royal lineage making a plea
> for help from some General OS/1 Kenobi.
>
> "Darn," mumbled Luke. "I'll never get this Asteroids game worked out."
>
> PDP-1 seemed to think there was some significance to the message and a
> possible threat to Luke's home directory. If the Administrative Empire
> was indeed tracing this 'droid, it was likely they would more than charge
> for cpu time...
>
> "We must get that 'droid off this file system," he said after some intervals.
> They sped off to warn Luke's kin (taking a `relative' path) only to find a
> vacant directory...
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> After sifting through the overwritten remaining blocks of Luke's home
> directory, Luke and PDP-1 sped away from /owen/lars, across the
> surface of the Winchester riding Luke's flying read/write head. PDP-1 had
> Luke stop at the edge of the cylinder overlooking /usr/spool/uucp.
>
> "Unix-to-Unix Copy Program," said PDP-1. "You will never find 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 Administrative protection bits.
>
> "State your UID," commanded their parent process.
>
> "We're running under /usr/guest," said Luke. "This is our first time on this
> system."
>
> "Can I see some temporary priviledges, please?"
>
> "Uh..."
>
> "This is not the process you are looking for," piped in PDP-1, using an
> obscure bug to momentarily set his effective UID to root. "We can go
> about our business."
>
> "This isn't the process we want. You are free to go about your
> business. MOV along!"
>
> PDP-1 and Luke made their way through a long and tortuous nodelist
> (cwruecmp!decvax!ucbvax!harpo!ihnss!ihnsc!ihnss!ihps3!stolaf)
> to a dangerous netnode frequented by hackers, and seldom polled by
> Administrative Multiplexers. As Luke stepped up to the bus, PDP-1 went in
> search of a likely file descriptor. Luke had never seen such a
> collection of weird and exotic device drivers. Long ones, short ones,
> ones with stacks, EBCDIC converters, and direct binary interfaces all
> were drinking data at the bus.
>
> "#@{ *&^%^$$#@ ":><?><," transmitted a particularly unstructured piece
> of code.
>
> "He doesn't like you," decoded his coroutine.
>
> "Sorry," replied Luke, beginning to backup his partitions.
>
> "I don't like you either. I am queued for deletion on 12 systems."
>
> "I'll be careful."
>
> "You'll be reallocated!" concatenated the coroutine.
>
> "This little routine isn't worth the overhead," said PDP-1 Kenobi,
> overlaying into Luke's address space.
>
> "@$%&(&^%&$$@$#@$AV^$gfdfRW$#@!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" encoded the first
> coroutine as it attempted to overload PDP-1's input overvoltage
> protection. With a unary stroke of his bytesaber, Kenobi unlinked
> the offensive code.
>
> "I think I've found an I/O device that might suit us."
>
> "The name's Con Solo," said the hacker next to PDP-1. "I hear you're
> looking for some relocation."
>
> "Yes indeed, if it's a fast channel. We must get off this device."
>
> "Fast channel? The Milliamp Falcon has made the ARPA gate in less than
> twelve nodes! Why, I've even outrun cancelled messages. It's fast
> enough for you, old version."
>
> Our heroes, Luke Vaxhacker and PDP-1 Kenobi made their way to the
> temporary file structure. When he saw the hardware, Luke exclaimed,
> "What a piece of junk! That's just a paper tape reader!"
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Luke had grown up on an out of the way terminal cluster whose natives spoke
> only BASIC, but even he could recognize an old ASR-33.
>
> "It needs an EIA conversion at least," sniffed 3CPU, who was (as usual)
> trying to do several things at once. Lights flashed in Con Solo's eyes
> as he whirled to face the parallel processor.
>
> "I've added a few jumpers. The Milliamp Falcon can run current loops around
> any Administrative TTY fighter. She's fast enough for you."
>
> "Who's your co-pilot?" asked PDP-1 Kenobi.
>
> "Two Bacco, here, my Bookie."
>
> "Odds aren't good," said the brownish lump beside him, and then fell silent,
> or over. Luke couldn't tell which way was top underneath all those leaves.
>
> Suddenly, RS232 started spacing wildly. They turned just in time to see
> a write cycle coming down the UNIBUS toward them. "Administrative Bus Signals!"
> shouted Con Solo. "Let's boot this pop stand! Tooie, set clock fast!"
>
> "Ok, Con," said Luke. "You said this crate was fast enough. Get us out
> of here!"
>
> "Shut up, kid! Two Bacco, prepare to make the jump into system space!
> I'll try to keep their buffers full."
>
> As the bookie began to compute the vectors into low core, spurious characters
> appeared around the Milliamp Falcon. "They're firing!" shouted Luke. "Can't
> you do something?"
>
> "Making the jump to system space takes time, kid. One missed cycle and you
> could come down right in the middle of a pack of stack frames!"
>
> "Three to five we can go now," said the bookie. Bright chunks of position
> independent code flashed by the cockpit as the Milliamp Falcon jumped through
> the kernel page tables. As the crew breathed a sigh of relief, the bookie
> started paying off bets.
>
> "Not bad, for an acoustically coupled network," remarked 3CPU. "Though
> there was a little phase jitter as we changed parity."
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The story thus far: Luke, PDP-1 and their 'droids RS232 and 3CPU have made
> good their escape from the Administrative Bus Signals with the aid of Con Solo
> and the bookie, Two Bacco. The Milliamp Falcon hurtles onward through
> system space. Meanwhile, on a distant page in user space...
>
> Princess _LPA0: was ushered into the conference room, followed closely by
> Dec Vadic. "Governor Tarchive," she spat, "I should have expected to
> find you holding Vadics lead. I recognized your unique pattern when I was
> first brought aboard." She eyed the 0177545 tatooed on his header coldly.
>
> "Charming to the last," Tarchive declared menacingly. "Vadic, have you
> retrieved any information?"
>
> "Her resistance to the logic probe is considerable," Vadic rasped.
> "Perhaps we would get faster results if we increased the supply voltage..."
>
> "You've had your chance, Vadic. Now I would like the princess to witness
> the test that will make this workstation fully operational. Today we
> enable the -r beam option, and we've chosen the princess' $HOME of
> /usr/alderaan as the primary target."
>
> "No! You can't! /usr/alderaan is a public account, with no restricted
> permissions. We have no backup tapes! You can't..."
>
> "Then name the rebel inode!" Tarchive snapped.
>
> A voice announced over a hidden speaker that they had arrived in /usr.
>
> "1248," she whispered, "They're on /dev/rm3. Inode 1248, /mnt/dantooine."
> She turned away.
>
> Tarchive sighed with satisfaction. "There, you see, Lord Vadic? She can
> be reasonable. Proceed with the operation."
>
> It took several clock ticks for the words to penetrate. "What!" _LPA0:
> gasped.
>
> "/dev/rm3 is not a mounted filesystem," Tarchive explained. "We require a
> more visible subject to demonstrate the power of the Are-Em Star workstation.
> We will mount an attack on /mnt/dantooine as soon as possible."
>
> As the princess watched, Tarchive reached over and typed "ls" on a nearby
> terminal. There was a brief pause, there being only one processor on board,
> and the viewscreen showed, ".: not found." The princess suddenly double-
> spaced and went off-line.
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> The Milliamp Falcon hurtles on through system space...
>
> Con Solo finished checking the various control and status registers, finally
> convinced himself that they had lost the Bus Signals as they passed the
> terminator. As he returned from the I/O page, he smelled smoke.
> Solo wasn't concerned--the Bookie always got a little hot under the collar
> when he was losing at chess. In fact, RS232 had just executed a particularly
> clever MOV that had blocked the Bookie's data paths. The Bookie, who had
> been setting the odds on the game, was caught holding all the cards. A
> little strange for a chess game...
>
> Across the room, Luke was too busy practicing bit-slice technique to notice
> the commotion.
>
> "On a word boundary, Luke," said PDP-1. "Don't just hack at it. Remember,
> the Bytesaber is the weapon of the Red-eye Night. It is used to trim offensive
> lines of code. Excess handwaving won't get you anywhere. Listen for the
> Carrier."
>
> Luke turned back to the drone, which was humming quietly in the air next to
> him. This time Luke's actions complemented the drone's attacks perfectly.
>
> Con Solo, being an unimaginative hacker, was not impressed. "Forget this
> bit-slicing stuff. Give me a good ROM blaster any day."
>
> "~~j~~hhji~~," said Kenobi, with no clear inflection. He fell silent for a
> few seconds, and reasserted his control.
>
> "What happened?" asked Luke.
>
> "Strange," said PDP-1. "I felt a momentary glitch in the Carrier. It's
> equalized now."
>
> "We're coming up on user space," called Solo from the CSR. As they
> cruised safely through stack frames, the emerged in the new context only
> to be bombarded by freeblocks.
>
> "What the..." gasped Solo. The screen showed clearly:
> /usr/alderaan: not found
> "It's the right inode, but it's been cleared! Twoie, where's the nearest
> file?"
>
> "3 to 5 there's one..." the Bookie started to say, but was interrupted by
> a bright flash off to the left.
>
> "Administrative TTY fighters!" shouted Solo. "A whole DZ of them! Where
> are they coming from?"
>
> "Can't be far from the host system," said Kenobi. "They all have direct EIA
> connections."
>
> As Solo began to give chase, the ship lurched suddenly. Luke noticed the
> link count was at 3 and climbing rapidly.
>
> "This is no regular file," murmured Kenobi. "Look at the ODS directory
> structure ahead! They seem to have us in a tractor feed."
>
> "There's no way we'll unlink in time," said Solo. "We're going in."
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> When we last left Luke, the Milliamp Falcon was being pulled down to the
> open collector of the Administrative Are-Em Star Workstation. Dec Vadic
> surveys the relic as Administrative Flunkies search for passengers...
>
> "LS scan shows no one aboard, sir," was the report. Vadic was unconvinced.
>
> "Send a fully equipped Ncheck squad on board," he said. "I want every
> inode checked out." He turned around (secondary channel) and stalked off.
>
> On board the Milliamp Falcon, .Luke was puzzled. "They just walked in,
> looked around and walked off," he said. "Why didn't they see us?"
>
> .Con smiled. "An old munchkin trick," he explained. "See that period in
> front of your name?"
>
> .Luke spun around, just in time to see the decimal point. "Where'd that
> come from?" he asked.
>
> "Spare decimal points lying around from the last time I fixed the floating
> point accelerator," said .Con. "Handy for smuggling blocks accross file
> system boundaries, but I never thought I'd have to use them on myself.
> They aren't going to be fooled for long, though. We'd better figure a way
> outa here."
>
> -----------------------------------------
> At this point (.) the dialogue tends to wedge. Being the editor and in
> total control of the situation, I think it would be best if we sort of
> gronk the next few paragraphs. For those who care, our heroes find
> themselves in a terminal room of the Workstation, having thrashed several
> Flunkies to get there. For the rest of you, just keep banging the
> rocks together, guys. --Ed.
> -----------------------------------------
>
> "Hold on," said Con. "It says we have `new mail.' Is that an error?"
>
> "%SYS-W-NORMAL, Normal, successful completion," said PDP-1. "Doesn't
> look like it. I've found the inode for the Milliamp Falcon. It's locked
> in kernel data space. I'll have to slip in and patch the reference count,
> alone." He disappeared through a nearby entry point.
>
> Meanwhile, RS232 found a serial port and logged in. His bell started
> ringing loudly. "He keeps saying, `She's on line, she's on line'," said
> 3CPU. "I believe he means Princess _LPA0:. She's being held on one of
> the privileged levels."
>
> -----------------------------------------
> Once again, things get sticky, and the dialogue suffers the most damage.
> After much handwaving and general flaming, they agree to rescue her.
> They headed for the detention level, posing as Flunkies (which is hard
> for most hackers) claiming that they had trapped the Bookie executing
> an illegal racket. They reached the block where the Princess was locked
> up and found only two guards in the header. --Ed.
> -----------------------------------------
>
> "Good day, eh?" said the first guard.
>
> "How's it goin', eh?" said the other. "Like, what's that, eh?"
>
> "Process transfer from block 1138, dev 10/9," said Con.
>
> "Take off, it is not," said the first guard. "Nobody told US about it, and
> we're not morons, eh?"
>
> At this point (.), the Bookie started raving wildly, Con shouted "Look out,
> he's loose!" and they all started blasting ROMs left and right. The guards
> started to catch on and were about to issue a general wakeup when the ROM
> blasters were turned on them.
>
> "Quickly, now," said Con. "What buffer is she in? It's not going to take
> long for these..."
>
> The intercom receiver interrupted him, so he took out its firmware with a
> short blast.
>
> "guys to figure out something is goin' on," he continued.
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Ok, like, remember we left our heroes in the detention priority level? Well,
> they're still there...
>
>
> Luke quickly located the interface card and followed the cables to a sound-
> proof enclosure. He lifted the lid and peered at the mechanism inside.
>
> "Aren't you a little slow for ECL?" printed princess _LPA0:.
>
> "Wha? Oh, the Docksiders," stammered Luke. He took off his shoes (for
> industry) and explained, "I've come relocate you. I'm Luke Vaxhacker."
>
> Suddenly, forms started bursting around them. "They've blocked the queue!"
> shouted Solo. "There's only one return from this stack!"
>
> "OVER HERE!" printed _LPA0: with overstrikes. "THROUGH THIS LOOPHOLE!"
> Luke and the princess disappeared into a nearby feature.
>
> "Gritch, gritch," mumbled Two Bacco, obviously reluctant to trust
> an Administrative oversight.
>
> "I don't care how crufty it is!" shouted Con, pushing the Bookie toward
> the crock. "DPB yourself in there now!"
>
> With one last blast that reprogrammed two flunkies, Con joined them.
> The "feature" landed them right in the middle of the garbage collection
> data. Pieces of data that hadn't been used in weeks floated past in
> a pool of decaying bits.
>
> "Bletch!" was Con's first comment. "Bletch, bletch," was his second.
> The Bookie looked as if he'd just paid a long shot, and the odds in this
> situation weren't much better.
>
> Luke was polling the garbage when he stumbled upon a book with the words
> "Don't Panic" inscribed in large, friendly letters on the cover. "This
> can't possibly help us now," he said as he tossed the book away.
>
> The Bookie was about to lay odds on it when Luke suddenly disappeared.
> He popped up accross the pool, shouting, "This is no feature! It's a bug!"
> and promptly vanished again.
>
> Con and the princess were about to panic() when Luke reappeared. "What
> happened?" they asked in parallel.
>
> "I don't know," gasped Luke. "The bug just dissolved automagically.
> Maybe it hit a breakpoint..."
>
> "I don't think so," said Con. "Look how the pool is shrinking. I've
> got a bad feeling about this..."
>
> The princess was the first to realize what was going on. "They've implemented
> a new compaction algorithm!" she exclaimed.
>
> Luke remembered the pipe he had open to 3CPU. "Shut down garbage collection
> on recursion level 5!" he shouted.
>
> Back in the control room, RS232 searched the process table for the lisp
> interpreter. "Hurry," sent 3CPU. "Hurry, hurry," added his other two
> processors. RS232 found the interpreter, interrupted it, and altered
> the stack frame they'd fallen into to allow a normal return.
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Meanwhile, PDP-1 made his way deep into the core of the Workstation,
> slipping from context to context, undetected through his manipulation
> of label_t. Finally, causing a random trap (through nofault of his own)
> he arrived at the inode table. Activity there was always high, but the
> Spl6 sentries were too secure in their knowledge that no user could
> interrupt them to notice the bug that PDP-1 carefully introduced. On a
> passing iput, he adjusted the device and inode numbers, maintaining parity,
> to free the Milliamp Falcon. They would be long gone before the locked
> inode was diagnosed...
>
> Unobserved, he began traversing user structures to find the process where
> the Milliamp Falcon was grounded. Finding it and switching context,
> he discovered his priority weakened suddenly. "That's not very nice,"
> was all he could say before the cause of the obstruction became clear.
>
> "I have been pausing a long time, PDP-1 Kenobi," rasped Dec Vadic. "We
> meet again at last. The circuit has been completed."
>
> They looped several times, locking byte sabers. Bit by bit, PDP-1 appeared
> to weaken. The fight had come into the address space of the Milliamp
> Falcon, and provided the .di (diversion?) that allowed Luke and the others
> to reassert control. Luke paused to watch the conflict.
>
> "If my blade finds its mark," warned Kenobi, "you will be reduced to so
> many bits. But if you slice me down, I will only gain computing power."
>
> "Your documentation no longer confuses me, old version," growled Vadic.
> "my Role MASTER now."
>
> With one stroke, Vadic sliced Kenobi's last word. Unfortunately, the word
> was still in Kenobi's throat. The word fell clean in two, but Kenobi was
> nowhere to be found. Vadic noticed his victim's uid go negative, just
> before he disappeared. Odd, he thought, since uids were unsigned...
>
> Luke witnessed all this, and had to be dragged into the Milliamp Falcon.
> Con Solo and Two Bacco maneuvered the Milliamp Falcon out of the process,
> onto the bus and made straight for system space. 3CPU and RS232 were
> idle, for once. Princess _LPA0: tried to print comforting things for him,
> but Luke was still hung from the loss of his friend. Then, seemingly from
> nowhere, he thought he heard PDP-1's voice say,
>
> May the carrier be with you."
>
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>
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