zlacker

>>golden+(OP)
In high school, we had a Netware 3.12 environment, and the Guest account was enabled, albeit with very limited privileges. But for some reason, Guest could still use NET SEND, which popped up a little message in the bottom row of the destination machine's display.

The whole district shared a T1 connection to the internet. Which was more than plenty for email, but as this world-wide-web thing started gaining traction, it became quite the bottleneck. And as some of us had discovered mp3 files, the slowness simply would not do.

One day there was some severe weather and a power hiccup during school hours, and every station got a message from ADMIN informing us that the server room was running on UPS power and we should save our files and log out immediately.

Hmmmm.

A few weeks later, one of the bright sparks in the technology program realized that having everyone log off would free up some bandwidth. So he logged onto the next machine over as GUEST, and used a NET SEND ALL "SERVER ROOM POWER FAILURE - 11 MIN OF BATTERY REMAIN - SAVE FILES AND LOG OFF" and sure enough, within about a minute, the whole T1 was his. Did what he needed to do (i.e. leeching an entire fserv) for about 8 minutes, then NET SEND ALL "POWER RESTORED - RESUME YOUR WORK".

A few weeks later some hot commodity had just dropped and he repeated the drill. It still worked.

Nobody noticed that these messages came from GUEST, even the district administrator, who eventually called an electrical contractor to figure out why the power in the server room was so flaky. Someone eventually pointed it out to him, which got a very red-faced "that's really clever but please knock it off", and no further punishment. The next day, the Guest account had a lot fewer privileges.

>>myself+Xb1
This was a better way to find out about NET SEND than attempting to use it for a somewhat vulgar in-joke to a work buddy one desk over, and instead popping a message on every single one of the about 10,000 PCs installed throughout the bank where you work.

Despite being phone support (think "cattle") I didn't get fired or indeed anything at all past a half-shocked, half-laughing "never ever do that again" sort of chat, and even that not from any of the floor mommies or daddies who were careful not to have to notice any of this, but just my line manager who might have been all of five years older than I was then. I assume this was slightly because I was extremely good at the job, and mainly for the sake of whoever in IT's job it was to make sure nobody could officially do what I, somehow, in the end turned out only unofficially to have done.