Weird UNIX World Of Whacky Wheel Wars
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- čas přidán 3. 08. 2024
- Nowadays most of us operate on single user systems but this is a fairly recent phenomenon, in the past it was common to have multiple users remote into the same system in what is known as a multi seat system and these caused a bit of a problem when some users went crazy with wheel privileges starting what is known as a wheel war
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Unix's legacy feels like random crap unrelated to today's linux but no one touches it because it works 😅
like X11 lol
@@fallow_don’t say things like that 😠
@@user-yw1nm4je8o I'm not going to deny that XFree86 and later XOrg were very important for Linux desktop use, but Wayland is becoming the reset the display protocol stack needs.
@@user-yw1nm4je8oit's completely true though, also proprietary extensions ensured that X wasn't going to change because vendors would make their own (often binary only) fixes for performance or security then build an entire business model off of it. This is the case even with many Windows based terminals btw.
UNIX is the only system that was actually designed. Linux just reimplemented the design. That is the part that is actually solid and works reliably.
I was given admin access to a shared machine and I was so scared I'd break things, I made myself a non-admin account and switch to the other only when I need to lol
I'm paranoid like that
This is the correct way.
That's.... Sound reasnoble actually.
The idea of a wheel war becomes really hilarious when you consider that the term computer used to be a job title and then you extrapolate wheel war to absurdity using a human instead of an electrical computer
I remember during high school, we'd have to do various IT projects and use our school's infrastructure for it. Unfortunately, all student projects were assigned one shared host, either on purpose or by accident, which almost immediately lead to conflicts between students trying to set anything up. Oh you wanted to run an HTTP server on port 8080? Too bad, that's already in use. You wanted to start your server? Sorry, someone uninstalled your server software because it was incompatible with their server software. It was a complete mess and the only way we got anything done was by completely disregarding the rule of "it has to be hosted on school infrastructure" and hosting everything ourselves.
That sounds like a shitshow cooked up by a faculty that had no idea what they were supposed to be teaching. I'm glad you learned something despite the administration's efforts to thwart you. When I took programming in high school they were still teaching VB6, and nothing else. I submitted finished projects in several different languages, none of which were VB of any sort, and as long as the compiled program did what was required in the assignment I'd get marked for it. Not sure if the teacher just didn't understand the code at all, or did and recognized that I had gone beyond the curriculum.
Yeah, when I was at TAFE as late as about 2008 all the students had to use a shared network drive for project storage, that's just asking for mischief when you're not talking about a single class but every student on campus having access, and potentially from other campuses because IIRC remote students had access to it via the portal as well. Like please please learn to use Windows group policies and avoid this please.
Yes Windows sucks for security but it doesn't have to.
This is why policies were created. People don't automatically assume the worst until it happens. Once they put policies in place, that's when they started looking for root exploits.
Policies existed though? Something tells me you've never seen this side of corporate/institutional politics. People in these environments sometimes pull truly insane crap.
Policies? You mean something like groups for permissions?
@@susamogus11111 Not exactly. I'm pretty sure it started with who gets the root password. Don't leave the password on the keyboard/monitor, etc. The first policies were human rules. We've always been the weak link.
@@orbatos I've seen some issues. I've heard of many. Some pull insane crap and some are just idiots.
@@mikechappell4156 the bofh was funny because it was almost true to life albeit with more identifiable bodies.
When I was an intern at my government's water company's IT department I got the administrator access to a backroom service that allows us to view and change data from all citizens(there is only a government service for water)
They never changed it after I left so I still have the ability to view and modify all user data from my prefecture.
This is all government sectors btw because they are run by boomers.
Multiseat is astounding easy even today. You could do it with lots of serial terminals but that would be a bit weird. Instead you just SSH into the "big" computer. This is absolutely commonplace in HPC even today and how I enable access to the HPC system I manage at work. Now get of my lawn.
"Please don't start any wheel wars, we got too many wheel ones." Aha! I see what you did there... very clever, very clever.
The early computers were all based on the terminal model. In fact, this was so pervasive the earliest PCs hobbyists could own were based on the same model - you'd buy a box, then hook that box up to your terminal and interact through the terminal. The Apple 1 was based on the same model - the key difference is that it had the "computing part" hooked to a "terminal part" on one board, but it was a computer with an attached terminal still. It was only the Apple II that gave us the whole "attached console" concept we know today where a computer will have a keyboard and monitor attached and people interacting that way with ti and not through terminals. Of course, UNIX was designed around terminals so it turned the local attached display and keyboard into a terminal session as well. This remains even as computers with attached monitors and keyboards became the norm - the console was still a terminal.
Ah, this explains why Windows still uses a loopback network connection at login, legacy of UNIX.
Computers were multiseat/multiuser at first for technical+practical reasons, then they went singleuser for profit reasons, then they went multiuser again (cloud,android,chromebooks, etc.) for profit+data collection reasons. 😃
If i had such access i would probably be too scared of punishment to do anything crazy...
Whoever is maintaining the system would sooner or later find out and remove my access.
Then i'd be without my precious computing power 😨
Not if you remove his access first.
Well, if you did, you could also be out of the school or job too, with no computing at all!
log files take up precious disk space, im sure deleting a password and a few files wouldnt show up on the log, so no one would know who did it.
Even back in 1984 AI people weren't trustable.
Is this the work of an enemy 「W H E E L」?
We used multiseat/thinclient via VNC and/or SSH+X11 forwarding at university around 2008 in the compsci department for undergrads.
I used it a bit earlier. At your point it generally worked pretty well if the endpoints had enough bandwidth and hardware decryption. You could even have OpenGL.
I would commandeer the entire graphics lab at night from my dorm to work and just forward the graphical components I needed.
The year we got serial connections to the VAX 11/750 in our dorm rooms in the 80s was a great year.
A previous workplace of mine had limited what one could do with sudo. One of the things I needed to do was to install a newer git version than what was available in the old repos they used, so I figured I'd just build it from source. This worked fine, but I was not able to install the documentation, because `sudo make install-docs` was not a legal command to run. However, `sudo make install` was legal, so I just modified the makefile to make sure `make install` also ran `make install-docs`. It also showcased how easy it was to circumvent the sudo limits...
so someone could do a:
install:
rm -rf / --no-preserve root
also, was $PATH not standard yet?
@@Hyperboid probably, yes. No clue what you mean by path not being standard though.
In the late 90s my University still had a unix lab of X Terminals connected to a Solaris server. It seemed really antiquated at the time. A wheel war was likely not possible as by the late 90s people knew how to properly administer systems.
How did it feel much more antiquated than the Windows 9x or even 3.11 systems, very likely underpowered compared to a solaris server, most people were probably used to at that time?
If it were me, I'd probably have modified their "~/.bashrc", or whatever the equivalent at the time was, and added "alias ls='rm -rf .'" :D
In self defense, I'd probably do something that opens a file, fills it up to their quota, then unlinks it while keeping it open. Or hilarious LD_PRELOAD practical jokes.
Your computer is mine now. ;)
No forehead Brodie is my favourite part of the Wheel group. Love the thumbnail 😂
Time to get control of the system back _wheely_ fast!
I'll see myself out of this comment section...
Whenever I have permissions that I shouldn't on a computer, I just do a little bit of trolling. The computers I used when I was in school were extremely locked down (to the point of hindering work) so I would mess with things at any chance that I got. I never did anything destructive, it was just harmless fun. At some point, the admin credentials circulated around the school and I used it to remove the restictions on the computer so that I could get work done (I also changed the wallpaper because I could). They eventually changed the admin password so I couldn't do that anymore (any change made would revert on logout). They did lift quite a few restrictions after that though.
I remember using X terminals like what you showed. There was a time in the late 80s where Windows 3 did not exist. DOS was all CUA text UI (think Borland C and Pascal). The best GUI was on the Amiga 500. Even an X terminal running TWM seemed pretty snazzy. Heck, in 03 and 04, running Gnome 1 or Enlightenment still seemed cool. As an aider I had some elevated privileges on a few machines but not as much as an operator. The attitude was kind of like, as long as they don't mess with the telecommunications staff, student operators were cheaper than IT people. But people could get touchy and possessive about the machines. And God forbid you pissed off the wrong operator.
Technically there were MSWindows versions before 3, but good luck finding anyone that properly used them...
@@absalomdraconis because they weren't properly usable lol. For the most part pre 3.1 they were only over glorified interfaces for launching apps anyway, and most people could throw together a batch menu fast enough to not need to do that. It wasn't really till 3.0/3.1 that software 'for Windows' started to be viable and available. (think i've still got a 5 1/4" floppy in storage with Windows 2 on it... doubt it's readable these days lol)
@@absalomdraconis The only real useful applications for Windows prior to version 3.x were desktop publishing apps like Aldus Pagemaker, and vector drawing applications like Micrografx In-a-Vision. Also, PC Paintbrush from Zsoft was popular, so popular in fact that Microsoft actually licensed a version of it to ship with Windows, which became the Microsoft Paint program that's been included with Windows for ages. But yeah, unless you were doing something very graphical like early computer drawing or desktop publishing, you wouldn't have used a version of Windows prior to 3.0, as it was basically only designed to run the handful of early Mac applications that didn't run sufficiently well under DOS and needed a windowing environment but weren't very dependent on graphical acceleration or having the hardware all to themselves like a CAD program.
The irony: Some software managed to do really, really good UX with just CUA text UIs.
@@pcallycat90433.11 when the network stack wasn't total dogshit anymore either, don't get me wrong it was still dogshit but at least you could make it work sometimes.
10:40 lets not forget that universities still run large computing clusters, allowing sometimes hundreds of users to access them simultaneously, so the problem still exists, just that we now know how to manage it, and as you mentioned we have better tools to do so.
that thumbnail is super cursed, I love it
I took a class in college about infosec, mainly focusing on operational security and access control. there's some interesting stuff in there, and the way the goverment handles classified information with their compartmentalization and other access control requirements is quite interesting
also, cliff stoll's "the cuckoo's egg" is a cool book about some early info sec stuff
The actual solution is to ensure that root access isn't necessary for as many things as possible. For example, if it's possible to upload and run an executable under your own user, it should also be possible to install packages that share your own permissions and quotas. There's nothing inherently dangerous about packages that isn't also a risk with uploading binaries.
BTW, text-terminal based multiseat existed even in the 8-bit world (MP/M), not just Unix, minicomputers and mainframes.
If I was a sysadmin on a multi seat system I'd add random aliases to the user's shell rc files.
I use arch btw
In 2008. A network engineer who locked administrators out of San Francisco's computer system for 12 days was properly ordered to pay $1.4 million in restitution, an appeals court ruled.
Prosecutors showed that Terry Childs hijacked the San Francisco FiberWAN network for 12 days in 2008 after years of contention between the city and its engineer. Concerns over possible layoffs, coupled with the discovery that Childs lied about his criminal background when he applied, led Childs to abscond with both network passwords and the backup configurations.
While no network service outages occurred during the 12 days Childs had locked the city out, no one could access the network to administer it, either. At the time, more than 65 city departments used the FiberWAN network.
In the end, Childs gave the network passwords and backups to then-mayor Gavin Newsom personally. San Francisco spent four months and $866,000 to recover the network, leading police to add a property loss enhancement to the charges against Childs.
Throw the book at someone like this - he could have proven his attitude is no longer criminal, he did the opposite. Disgrace to all IT professionals.
I just watched one of your first wheel war vids yesterday. What a coincidence
I had the equivalent of permanent root access to the mainframes in three major data centers for a brokerage house for a few years. That was normal for systems programmers at the time - and still today you just have to trust people not to be ass**les in some positions, you can't have absolute security. The fact that I had root access just made me careful - it's not hard to follow practices that protect you from making stupid errors. And we were very cautious about new employees fresh from college - there was no way that the crap students pulled at school would be tolerated in a corporation.
I've used multiseat on my main work pc to share a 2nd gpu so i could play genshin with my friends via the Internet
it was a cool adventure
Genshin? You are not that old then. We had only Fortnite back then. (Just joking, if that wasn't obvious enough. I'm an 80s kid.)
@@thingsiplay i was trying to help a friend of mine save money on geforce now, they didn't but that's on them
@@thingsiplay The glory days of early networking havoc on DOS/Windows and playing Quake with your classmates and occasionally teachers. LOL In all seriousness a heap of my 3U computer studies course in class was spent on Quake 2 after we'd spent half an hour learning how to do binary maths. Then my bloody teacher got himself knocked out for falsely calling another one a paedo and sent on long service so there goes that course.
The Atanasoff-Berry computer (ABC) was the first automatic electronic digital computer (although considered not Turing-complete). ENIAC used derived work from it.
On June 26, 1947, J. Presper Eckert and John Mauchly were the first to file for patent on a digital computing device (ENIAC), much to the surprise of Atanasoff. The ABC had been examined by John Mauchly in June 1941, and Isaac Auerbach,[16] a former student of Mauchly's, alleged that it influenced his later work on ENIAC, although Mauchly denied this.
The case was legally resolved on October 19, 1973, when U.S. District Judge Earl R. Larson held the ENIAC patent invalid, ruling that the ENIAC derived many basic ideas from the Atanasoff-Berry computer. Judge Larson explicitly stated:
Eckert and Mauchly did not themselves first invent the automatic electronic digital computer, but instead derived that subject matter from one Dr. John Vincent Atanasoff.
Herman Goldstine, one of the original developers of ENIAC wrote:[19]
Atanasoff contemplated storing the coefficients of an equation in capacitors located on the periphery of a cylinder. He apparently had a prototype of his machine working "early in 1940". This machine was, it should be emphasized, probably the first use of vacuum tubes to do digital computation and was a special-purpose machine. This machine never saw the light of day as a serious tool for computation since it was somewhat premature in its engineering conception and limited in its logical one. Nonetheless it must be viewed as a great pioneering effort. Perhaps its chief importance was to influence the thinking of another physicist who was much interested in the computational process, John W. Mauchly. During the period of Atanasoff's work on his linear equation solver, Mauchly was at Ursinus College, a small school in the environs of Philadelphia. Somehow he became aware of Atanasoff's project and visited him for a week in 1941. During the visit the two men apparently went into Atanasoff's ideas in considerable detail. The discussion greatly influenced Mauchly and through him the entire history of electronic computers.
I feel bad that the client-server paradigm of X is being deprecated... I know, it's not needed now, but it was so cool to run an application on a server and have the UI on your machine. When I first saw it in mid-1990s, my jaw dropped. Windows still can't do that! It's worth keeping X just to feel superior :) "You're on Windows? Get a real OS." I know, I know... "Get a life" and so on... :)
Windows always believed more in the "non-seamless" RDP model.... The real problem is that the X11 world made a mistake a decade and a half ago by letting a lot of pre-rendering transition to client (X11 client) side libraries (cairo etc) instead of updating the server side capabilities (eg by updating font management capabilities, properly allowing OpenGL over the network, handling video compression more intelligently). Makes some modern apps (all practical web browsers...) extremely slow when you run them client-server. Wayland is of course repeating all the wrong mistakes the X11 world made.).
I believe Wayland equivalents actually exist
Holy ducking shit! Is that a UNIX reference?
In the other world of computing, the big iron that at a minimum oeeps the books it was clear the it was the it departments job to apportion the resources. The it department charged back the departments that used the resources a cray 1 would have systems to keep track of resource usage. This is of course the cloud works, but with virtual machines the it department just allocates the vms and charges for it.
While multiseat systems with X servers and clients running on separate machines are not a thing anymore, you can still run a single-PC multiseat easily, like so: _`loginctl attach seat1 `_
Just bring xrdp and you have a multi user system
CATB is ESR's web page... what you're looking at is a definition in the jargon file, otherwise known as the "hacker's dictionary." "Stanford University" means that where it was coined.
What? No Linux systems have multiple remote terminals/displays these days? Whoo boy.
Id be too interested in doing good with languages, and other stuff, like today. But id probably in the first place, not even know how to read if i were born then, because without my computers i wouldnt even come close to functioning as an adult.
Psycho Sysadmins can fite me, lmao.
Multiseat never really stopped being a thing in corporate IT. Windows terminal servers are everywhere.
Well, I don't think I could trust myself to not at all abuse admin power if I had it on a shared system, but I think I would (most of the time) be relatively sensible about it.
Same, I mean think about it, if you had 100% of the compute your work would get done infinity faster than everyone else!
The worst thing I would do is run all my processes with a low niceness.
Stealing CPU time is still a shitty thing to do but it isn't doing permanent damage.
There's always gonna be things admins didn't think of. It's not that in your place they don't know this can be done or that they don't know how to set up a policy, it just skipped their mind. This is why there has to be a documented policy that needs to be revised regularly over time. And yeah, I suppose users need to be somewhat responsible like you are, and not cause any serious damage if they find ways.
@@StupidusMaximusTheFirst yea. But I was saying that as a user with privilege that is as far as I would go
@@dadudeme a silly harmless prank here and there is fine, I've done this kind of thing for a laugh when I was younger, and that's fine, but if it's someone's job on the line, or any other serious damage or denial of service, it's best if people think again. Btw running your processes as not nice on a mainframe or a server can still cause serious problems. xD Anyway, I guess you knew what you were doing.
"Wheel War!" is my new battle cry.
Ah...
The sudo group...
I don't know if my past student self could've been trusted.
I know what I did, I can't be trusted
@@BrodieRobertson my first original program was a self replicating bash script meant to use all of the computer's available storage space. My second did the same thing with ram. That was fairly innocent, so I think I could be trusted. It's not like I was writing viruses or anything.
Gotta go mad with power a LITTLE at least 😂
Love the JoJo reference on the whiteboard. Hope you watched/read it.
This thumbnail 🤣🤣
I love doing this one
multiseat is the easier way to do 6 gamers 1 cpu
Wheel War!
Wheel War!
Wheel War!
So with low power sbc type computers, X forwarding (network transparency) is still a good idea to have, especially where resources and power are in short supply. a few raspberry pis and an I7 would be better than old school mainframes and x terminals, and that's why Wayland sucks.
Waypipe for Wayland would be much more stable for this use.
The problem is that some modern apps/UI toolkits (unfortunately, all practical web browsers) run god slow in that kind of setup.
@@splitprissm9339 So, running x terms over a fast LAN, say single user on system runs slow to notice?
@@splitprissm9339 You guys just want to make the system, one user at a time. ;-)
@@splitprissm9339 yes, but they run god slow any way, also less well funded institutions and people that like integrated systems for their homes, boats, ranches, etc, might have things other than watching CZcams.
Wikipedia is the perfect example of this kind of behaviour surfacing again and again.
Yay!
reminds me of the movie war games
I would be normal because being normal and responsible means getting to keep your access which is nice
Anyone who thinks weel wars are a thing of the past has never managed a Minecraft server for a bunch of kids.
Didn't you already done a video about the wheel group?
yeah feeling deja vu
Hey! I'm a normal sys-admin!
It's just everyone else on here that's the psychopaths! ;)
Attention!!!
Brodie comes out ANTI-WAR!
That is all.
I was expecting the Mario Kart clone with annoying beep sounds.
I have a slightly nuanced view about "being a psycho". I am autistic and sometimes the thought of having "civil discussion to ask permission" is terrifying vs just doing an action and asking for forgiveness. Today with knowledge of this I try to overcome my irrational fear and have the discussion. However I suspect many in the IT space particularly in the 70s were undiagnosed neurodivergent, without this self knowledge.
I'll put it this way: there's a reason I don't have any users.
We all like to think of ourselves as the benevolent benefactor, but the reality is, with unlimited power comes unlimited corruption, and most of us would fall into that trap sooner or later.
I think multi-user computing will make a come back. Now many people buy multiple computers for a family. But soon a single computer will again be easily powerful enough to handle the needs of several people without any problems.
What we call the "cloud" is kind of a spiritual successor to that kind of computing. It's done very differently though
I don't think so, most people with multiple pc in the same house use laptops
@@flarebear5346 Yes, sure, that's a well established fact but I didn't mean cloud. I just meant that it'll be enough to buy one actual "tower" in a household and have just a few screens and keyboards scattered around the house for whoever wants to do something, and just that one computer would be quite enough to handle the usage for the average use case of multiple people.
cloud is a spiritual successor of serfdom. @@flarebear5346
@@lePirateManMost people that I know with multiple PCs in their house have all desktops for personal gaming/entertainment use (and occasionally one laptop set up as a VPN thin clent for working at home.)
I would do just what is needed to maintain the system.
What was the story about the journey song? Don’t stop believing?
I have root rights to some systems at work, but I would never abuse those rights
Is the current state of Twitter then the result of a wheel war in terms of reverting other/previous admin's and management's changes and taking control of the platform? Just on a way higher scale?
No it's BOFH mischief without the competence, it's like you turned a manager loose with root.
I'm leaving a comment because I'm on debian so I feel obligated to...that being said...I still have no idea why it's called sudo and not wheel...I mean I get it...but it always felt weird to me that it strayed from the standard unix naming, especially since that group is used by more than just sudo as it's also used for polkit and anything else wanting to check to make sure you can root.
Debian appeared to like to name groups after services/applications. The command was sudo not wheel.
1:52 which mobile brand do you have? it definitely not some linux mobile
Power corrupts
I switched to Mac and pretty much everything in Linux also affects Mac yay it’s not chaos at all nope nu-uh
Is this the wheel life?
Or is this just fantasy?
2050 someone does a video on the crazy things people did in the past. " Guys what they used to do is rather than just installing apps they used to wrap apps up with all the needed libraries and make everything more difficult for themselves by having 20 versions of the same library on there system"
Ahhh the 70s, the start of the downfall of everything.
Comment for the algorithm. I would be normal.
But it’s not actually Unix so no
Pick up a wheel gun
:)
I clicked here to see some Wacky Wheels gaming. Disappointed.
GNU Project = literally communism 🤣 I seem to recall you did a video on something related to the wheel group once before, but it's still a massive LOL.
GNU is very far from being communist, stallman is more closer to social-democrat capitalist.
Some people can't not be a psycho! They are called Psycho's for a good reason!