Real-time tragedy: Dumb deletion leaves librarian red-faced and fails to nix teenage kicks on the school network
- Reference: 1586157308
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/04/06/who_me/
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Today's tale comes from "Sam", who whisks us back to his teenage years in the 1990s, and a network of Windows 95 machines in the school library. Doubtless suspicious of what shenanigans the students might get up to, the CD-ROM readers had been disabled, although a single floppy drive remained in each.
The restriction made the loading of "nefarious files", as Sam put it, a tad tricky. "Playing games," he added, "(or in fact, anything not pre-installed on the machines) was strictly forbidden."
Naturally, the gang "saw this rule either as more of a guideline or tool to catch the inexperienced technologist, or as a personal challenge".
They also loved playing computer games, although multiplayer shenanigans were difficult. Dial-up internet was iffy and ridiculously expensive, and lugging CRTs and PCs from house to house required an understanding parent and patience with balky BNC connectors.
But here, at the school, was a ready-made network, replete with hardware beefy enough to run Windows 95. Such gear would therefore have more than enough horsepower for a session on Westwood Studios' [2]Command & Conquer .
For those who have been spared the phenomena of C&C and its seemingly never-ending stream of sequels and expansions, the game was one of the earliest in the multiplayer real-time strategy (RTS) genre and was released in 1995. Based on the company's previous Dune II , the series sold millions and video game giant Electronic Arts snapped up the studio in 1998... before shuttering it in 2003.
While the boys had selected C&C as their game of choice, they did face a formidable foe in the form of The Librarian. "He was," said Sam, "an amicable chap, who would periodically venture into the room to spy people in violation of the rules, asking them politely to close whatever browser game they had fired up, in order to ensure machines were available for students to do actual work."
The other challenge was that C&C was very much a CD-ROM title, and the necessary drives were out of action. Not to be deterred, Sam set about stripping the game of its video and audio fripperies in search of a minimal installation. With the aid of AltaVista and some freeware tools, he reduced the footprint of the game from a 650MB CD down to a mere 5MB.
The disk-spanning feature of WinZip saw that spread over four disks.
"We snuck it onto the computers," he remembered happily, "buried somewhere in the c:\windows folder, and from there were able to propagate it across the network to every machine."
IPX-based tank destruction then ensued whenever the gang were in the library and The Librarian was out of sight. However, there is more to this tale than just the sneaking of a video game onto school property.
The Librarian, you see, knew something was going on by the way the computers would mysteriously reboot when he walked in, "but he was not tech savvy enough to know what to do about it".
The old man therefore called in assistance. "A PFY, a young intern fellow, possibly on some kind of work experience, we could never tell," remembered Sam.
The chap in question was assigned the task of removing all trace of gaming naughtiness from the network, starting with a game called something like "Command".
"In our absence," said Sam, "he logged into each machine, and using Windows 95's 'Find All Files' tool, searched for 'command'." His search bore fruit, and no doubt feeling smug and confident about his entrusted role, he set about deleting the file "command.com" from each and every machine.
"How clever of us to hide it in the System folder."
Those with long memories will remember command.com from their DOS and early Windows days. Also known as the DOS Prompt, it is the first program run after a boot process and executes the autoexec.bat file. It was the default command line interpreter and, most importantly, the vast majority of PCs simply wouldn't start without it.
However, it was also possible to delete it. If deleted, "Windows 95 will, on the whole, continue to operate without issue..." said Sam, "until it's rebooted."
And sure enough, having shut down the computer room as normal at the end of the school day, The Librarian arrived the following morning to find every single machine unbootable, and all displaying "The following file is missing or corrupted: COMMAND.COM."
"There was a fair amount of fallout and the room was shut for two days," remembered Sam.
In the end, Sam's group volunteered a solution to the problem, which The Librarian gratefully accepted. In return, he allowed the youths to play C&C "whenever he was reasonably confident he wouldn't get in trouble for it provided, of course, that we denied his involvement".
"We all gamed happily ever after, and unofficially supported the network until we graduated.
"The intern was, to our delight, never seen again."
Were you that intern? Or maybe you were the ones getting ever more creative in your desperation for some multiplayer mayhem? Tell your story with an email to the team at [3]Who, Me? ®
Sponsored: [4]How to Build Your Digital Experience Portfolio
[1] https://www.theregister.co.uk/Tag/who-me
[2] https://cnc-comm.com/command-and-conquer
[3] mailto:whome@theregister.co.uk
[4] https://go.theregister.co.uk/tl/1936/-8578/how-to-build-your-digital-experience-portfolio?td=wptl1936
"Look."
At what?
He just needs his dried frog pills!
He meant "Kool"!
My uni had similar rules :)
Of course, there the admins were more knowledgeable, so they had a boot floppy that would wipe a disk and initiate a fresh install from the network. The process took about 20 seconds after boot to start and half an hour to complete. If you were caught gaming, they would lean over your shoulder, insert the floppy, hit 'reset', wait the 20 seconds or so and then reclaim the floppy.
In later years, the machines could be booted from the network and wiped without the benefit of a floppy.
Re: My uni had similar rules :)
Ah yes the PCI add-in card, which meant at my colleague a virus was going round and reinfecting every Windows 9x machine which was rebooted, of course there were W2k machines which were used by the health and beauty courses that were unaffected.
Re: My uni had similar rules :)
which were used by the health and beauty courses that were unaffected.
of course......
Re: My uni had similar rules :)
Or boot from the network and not have any internal storage at all.
Always amusing to listen to someone attempting to bullshit their way to having a hard disk to put their games on for sound business reasons.
Diskless netboot
My secondary school did that with their first suite of PCs. Over 10Base-2. With 1MB of RAM and swap over the network.
If the Design & Tech department wanted to use Corel DRAW!, they had to book the suite for an extra period beforehand to allow it time to load and become (relatively) usable.
I got banned from using them about 5 minutes after the suite was opened because I fired up Turbo C++ from a floppy disk, which Miss Hitler our esteemed and universally beloved technician immediately classified as "hacking". There was much more fun to be had on the old Acorn computers anyway.
Re: My uni had similar rules :)
True admins are the bane of gamers everywhere.
Oh for Bob's sake... I meant Oook, obviously!
Give that Librarian a Banana
And, for Io's sake, don't use the M word!
GNU TP
Similar
I did once work with a helpdesk level 2, who decided that the best way to fix a Windows 2000/3 server running out of disk space would be to delete those pesky files in C:\Windows\System32. Very useful when its a domain controller. Even more useful when it was the only DC on that domain (3 servers, 30 Wyse terminals and a couple of laptops).
Re: Similar
Even more useful when it was the only DC on that domain
Which is why you always have a backup DC!
Re: Similar
This brings back long-suppressed memories of reinstalling a DC's HDD, which was serving a small research group in my Physics department, all done on a shoestring budget.
All the data had been copied off, but NT 4 could recognise a fresh install, and all the trust relationships would get b0rked.
So I brought in a frankenPC from home, installed NT4 Server on it, made it backup DC, then promoted it to Primary DC (taking much longer to do than to type).
Then came the reinstall on the actual server, with an actual Server licence, and the backup DC/promotion dance once more.
It was definitely beer o'clock by I'd finished that.
In the dim and distant past as a college admin, I found "deep freeze" and it was a life saver for everything except a small lab of Autodesk pc's
back in the good old days some bright lads at my polytechnic (remember those?) figured out how to shell out from the networked TurboC++ we used for programming assignments and then get to hensa (Higher Education National Software Archive) at Lancaster uni. can't remember the gory details but there wasn't a web browser to be seen!
I'm pretty sure they used a text based 'browser' that was not dependent on HTML. Maybe Synapse? I am sure someone will correct me.
No, HENSA (which I remember well) prefated the www - I forget the protocol used to download stuff, but it was one of the pre-WWW things that we all used!
probably gopher
Those were the days...
Well, you have to admit it encouraged creativity! In fact, they may well have spent more time working out how to get around restrictions than playing the games.....
Let's be honest...
What this really means:
"With the aid of AltaVista and some freeware tools, he reduced the footprint of the game from a 650MB CD down to a mere 5MB."
... is that he downloaded a nocd crack.
Looks like C&C needed about 30mb of hard drive space - all the video and music (Red Book? I've got vague memories of playing the soundtrack in my CD player!) was streamed off the CD.
And while I haven't checked[*], I'm guessing that there was at least some single-player files you could safely delete if you just wanted to go head to head.
So, yeah. Run the crack, have a few rounds of "does the game start after I delete this file?" and then fire up the shareware version of Winzip and run it in split-disk mode to get the data onto the floppies. Then you'd just have the fun of swapping disks to install onto the school computer, while crossing your fingers and hoping that disk #4 of #5 hadn't spontaneously developed a bad sector.
Time consuming, but not that complicated.
To be fair, we did something similar at university - there was a hidden network drive, which just happened to have a full copy of Doom installed. The weekend when my friend was gifted the knowledge of how to access this drive was a very fun weekend indeed...
[*] C&C, Red Alert and Tiberian Sun are available as freeware these days, directly from EA. Or at least, they /were/; with the imminent release of the newly remastered versions, the link to download ye olde games has mysteriously vanished from their website. Finding the ISOs from an alternative source and testing the above process is left as an exercise for the reader...
Re: Let's be honest...
Or instead of deleting large image files, simply replace with one with the same name and dimensions, but entirely black so it compresses well. For video, edit down to a single frame.
Re: Let's be honest...
> Or instead of deleting large image files, simply replace with one with the same name and dimensions, but entirely black so it compresses well. For video, edit down to a single frame.
That'd be tricky - video games tend to merge their assets into a single archive file - often with proprietary code and/or hacks to maximise performance (e.g. fixed offsets), especially back then when disk i/o was far far slower than it is today. Similarly, image and video tended to be in non-standard formats; Bink and Smacker were (are?) popular at the time, and images tended to be in a format which could support alpha channels.
So you'd have to decompile the archive, hack the video/audio/sound files and then glue everything back together, while also making sure that you don't trigger any tamper checks.
To be fair, people did occasionally do stuff like this, especially back in the days when games ran off floppy; especially on the Atari ST, crackers would often use compression and other tricks to cram multiple games onto a single floppy.
In fact, there's a tale about Operation Wulf on the Amiga/Atari ST[*]; the original, commercial release came on multiple floppies. Some enterprising cracker figured out how to squeeze the entire game into a single floppy, much to the amused chagrin of the game's publishers, as if the original developer had managed to do the same, it would have measurably reduced the distribution costs...
[*] Or possibly, it's sequel, Operation Thunderbolt? Again, digging out the exact details is left as an exercise for the reader!
Re: Let's be honest...
The C&C games where still being sold via Origin until recently (as a complete set from the original C&C + expansion packs, Red Alert + expansion packs & #2 & 3, all the later C&C games and Renegade the 1st/3rd person shooter that should have rewrote the FPS/TPS genres but failed in a big way). All for the princely sum of £9.99 (which I paid gladly for the lot!). The early games didn't like the 2160p resolution of my monitors without some ini file "hacking" to add the resolution options to the settings. The later games though looked fantastic in 2160p on a RTX2070 with everything maxed out. Looking forward to the remasters although they still look extremely dated in comparison to Tiberian Sun & Generals (which I would love to see running with Ray Tracing & DLSS enhancements). This might be the excuse to turn Renegade into what it should have been with Ray Tracing
Ah Altavista
I loved that search engine
COMMAND.COM
As found on any bootable floppy at the time. It shouldn't have been that hard to get the systems up and running again.
Our IT professor had us stumped for a long time
At my first uni our PCs were still on DOS - this was way back in the late eighties. I think it was DOS 4.0, in any case it was a version where you could put the disk prompt in color and many other things.
The first time I got my hands on those PCs I obviously wanted to have a look around the C: disk, but I got an error each time I tried to cd to a directory. It took me ages to finally grep that, with the prompt embellishments, our professor had managed to rename "C:\" to " C:\".
Simple, yet devilishly effective.
Of course, when he had noticed that I had discovered the ruse, he gave me his trademark stern look and made me promise not to tell anyone - promise which I honored scrupulously.
Ghost is the name
put the floppy in, restart, password.... 30 minutes back to normal.
shareware DOOM FTW
Fat Mac
Back in the day (1986), one of the blokes on my engineering course monopolised the Fat Macs (512kB RAM!) to do Mandelbrot simulations. He left big notes on them about "DO NOT TURN OFF - RUNNING SIMULATION". We rebooted them because we wanted to play our dungeon crawler (name escapes me). AFAIK, none of his simulations ever finished.
Look.