Comment by quietbritishjim
2 months ago
I was sure this story was going to end with your script causing chaos by calling finger in a busy loop. But every 2 minutes! Even in the 90s, that's a pretty mild amount of network traffic.
2 months ago
I was sure this story was going to end with your script causing chaos by calling finger in a busy loop. But every 2 minutes! Even in the 90s, that's a pretty mild amount of network traffic.
I think automatically printing the system console log to paper is the real villain in that story.
once i saw a guy run a pentest and a box was doing that. it printed an entire vulnerabilityscanner output verbatim all the bytes received o.O guy appearently got handed like 100m of paper with a request to pls not scan _that_ port :'D
some people had these setups and just never saw a lot of traffic because the boxes werent broadly routed on the internet etc. or internal.
now with all the scans and automated spamming by parties its totally unthinkable. most of my server bandwidth despite my efforts is going to this.. (thankfully down pay for that per bytes anymore!)
Printers used to, and maybe still do, have a port open that if you connected to it and send some ASCII text it would print that text. Complete with formatting codes like form-feed to switch to a new page.
The grey beards in the mid-90s cut their teeth on much more constrained systems! The web crawling these days probably has all the ones who have passed spinning rapidly in their graves.
Paper companies would rejoice at the idea of OpenTelemetry