Stephan Paukner :: syslog

From xkcd #557:

FULL ACK!

In the first years after my school graduation, already attending university, those dreams developed the situation that graduates are compelled to revisit school for one month every year to refresh a basic knowledge in various subjects—a not too weird idea after all. I went through situations like not remembering the location of our class room, teachers being upset about me not having shown up for long, or having hopelessly missed several exams. Through the years those dreams had to cope with my consciously strengthened memory about my school graduation and about that such a revisiting month simply doesn’t exist. However, a geeky brain like mine is still able to form a new plot.

I think I got rid of those dreams with my university graduation, having settled the idea of not having to attend unpleasant exams ever again. But I probably enjoy being a science/math/computer nerd way too much and should deal more with average daily knowledge about politics, economy, society and culture.

A reason why those dreams come up at all might be that stress and pressure at school are much more formative than they will later be in real working life.

Truck from somewhere in the near east, in bad shape, driving on highway. US Army convoy notices, declares it a threat, wants to get it off road. Driving fast. Bump in left turn, truck comes off, breaks through wall. US Army starts to secure place of accident. Behind wall, next to mountain, a bus with muslims having pee-break, think this is attack. Shooting. Muslims hide at mountain, US Army at wall. Grenade launchers, machine guns and bazookas. I should die, but ignore it. I hide behind heavy wall until silence. Above me, I see a kind of heavy gate opening cumbersomely: US army activates secret autonomous “gun machine” with four heavy barrels. Had been secretly built at various places to be activated remotely in case of threat, constructed for undefined targets. I expect the silent raging muslims coming over the wall every minute. Finally, the heavy gun machine raises above wall, but no shooting. I dare to look up, taking gun machine into control. Everybody gone or dead, only some bombs left. I shouldn’t shoot at them. I can leave.

I had a nightmare this night: Someone had hacked my server evily. Whatever command I tried to execute, strange log lines appeared on the terminal which looked like shell code installing a rootkit and sending passwords to an e-mail address. He/she even activated an HTTP-proxy which hijacked requests from within my network to some weird other URLs. As additional ‘fun’, the cracker replaced simple commands like ‘ls’ or ‘less’ with some counterpart like ‘rm’, such that I ruined the system more and more by myself. In my dream, I now had to spend all night to set up a new system with a bad feeling about not having enough know-how to conserve the broken system for forensic analysis.

Please, dear crackers, don’t do it like that.