You know what happens in early slackware or RHEL if you type “killall” with no args, as root? I do :) It does, exactly what you tell it to do... —L.B. Lady Benjamin PD Cannon, ASCE 6x7 Networks & 6x7 Telecom, LLC CEO ben@6by7.net <mailto:ben@6by7.net> "The only fully end-to-end encrypted global telecommunications company in the world.” FCC License KJ6FJJ
On Dec 10, 2020, at 4:53 PM, Valdis Klētnieks <valdis.kletnieks@vt.edu> wrote:
On Thu, 10 Dec 2020 18:56:04 -0500, Max Harmony via NANOG said:
Programs have never done what you *want* them to do, only what you = *tell* them to do.
Amen to that - there was the time many moons ago when we launched a copy of a vendor's network monitoring system, and told it to auto-discover the network. It found all the on-campus subnets and most of the machines, and didnt seem to be doing anything else, so we all headed home.
Come in the next morning, and discover that our 56k leased line to Nysernet (yes, *that* many moons ago) was clogged with the monitoring system trying to do SNMP probes against a significant fraction of the Internet in the Northeast.
Things apparently went particularly pear-shaped when it discovered the MIT/Boston routing swamp...
And of course, we *told* it "discover the network", when we *meant* "discover the network in this one /16.". Fortunately, it didn't support "discover the network and perform security scans on machines" - but I'm sure there's at least one security-scanning package out there that makes this same whoopsie all too easy to do, 3+ decades later...