Evil Has a New SysAdmin
Watch the video at http://www.thewebsiteisdown.com/ and you get a small idea of what my day is like, except for low level types I can ‘accidentally’ change someone’s credentials in the door control system if they annoy me too much.
Zombies.
Yes, zombies. The problem with the big volcano lair is it is home to a number of departments, and a good chunk of the space is used by R&D. I have nothing against R&D, they do great work, much of which couldn’t be done in an conventional environment.
The problem is that sometimes their R&D can have a, shall we say, negative impact on other departments. All the networking in this place is either fiber or shielded thanks to the strong EMI a lot of their work puts out, and the datacenter was intentionally put where it was in part to be out of the path of random explosions, shrapnel and miscellaneous projectiles, but every once in a while you still wind up with strange issues.
Case in point: I finally manage to get some competent help in Randall. Randall is a good guy, knows his stuff, works well enough to be left alone to do his thing. I decide to take a day off and head down to walk the cliffs along the controlled end of the island (I’ll have to tell you about the uncontrolled end sometime). I have a nice day, get some fresh air and relax a little, sure that Randall can handle things or at least reach me on the two-way if there’s an issue.
Things certainly took a turn for the worse when I got back. It seems that R&D was working on a new weapon that was supposed to make the target susceptible to suggestion at a very high level, allowing someone to fire it at enemy troops and then literally tell them to turn around and attack their own base. The weapon worked, albeit a little too well: in addition to making people susceptible to suggestion, it also turned them into mindless vegetables. And they didn’t work with a weak enough beam, resulting in it firing a brain-melting ray with a 2 mile range, up and out of the volcano.
I get back to the datacenter to find that lo-and-behold, the beam passed through on its way out of the volcano. I no longer have a junior sysadmin, I have a freaking braindead zombie whose been tearing drives out of the server and using them for freaking building blocks on the floor!
I open the door, tell Randall to get lost and proceed to survey the damage. To my surprise and delight Randall was random enough in his choice of drives that most of the RAID arrays are actually intact and running in degraded mode. Since there’s no point in trying to pair the drives back up to their original servers (mental note: label drives with machine id in addition to capacity, speed and date deployed), I just match them with a RAID array of the same disk size and capacity and let them rebuild.
After cleaning up the mess I head down to R&D to inquire about restoring Randall, but apparently it’s no use. They jokingly tell me I’m just lucky he’s just a mindless zombie and not some movie style killer zombie. They then offer to add some shielding they have been working on to the datacenter and I head off to find Randall.
I’ll say one thing, he may be a mindless zombie, but he sure took my instructions to get lost to heart. We’ll have to see where he winds up.
Well now that things are coming along around here I find myself with a nice setup. The server room is built out with proper (lethal) security, the power is redundant thanks to thermal power generation and a power source in R&D that I dare not ask about, and we’ve all the bandwidth we want thanks to stealing it from Iran (and the media played right into our ploy).
So now the question is, what to do with this nice datacenter?
I’ve proposed to the powers that be that we look at providing a sort of “Evil Co-Location” service and it looks like it will be happening. The goal isn’t so much to profit from the venture financially as to strengthen our ties with other evil entities around the globe who, for one reason or another, can’t keep their servers on-site or at a more traditional co-location facility.
Now to market it…
Benefits
Disadvantages
I’m pretty confident that we can offer the best colo service on the market for our target clientèle. That said, if anyone tries to spam on a server hosted with us, I’m taking their box off the rack and using it for rocket launcher target practice.
(Isn’t it great that my threat is totally serious? I love working here some days.)
There’s a funny humor piece at http://www.deepastronomy.com/how-to-destroy-earth-with-a-coffee-can.html that talks about destroying the earth with a coffee can.
It’s a fun read, but as one who works for an organization that develops various evil technologies including planetary destruction devices, I can assure you that while it takes more than a coffee can to destroy the Earth, it takes far less than “107,000,000,000,000 nuclear bombs”.
What you really need to destroy the Earth is a destructive force that grows at an exponential rate: you can either think along the lines of von Neumann machines or chain reactions.
Believe me, hitting the Earth with adequate force in a single shot is just not going to work.
The posters from this Comedy Goldmine at SomethingAwful are be spread around the lair, I think this one is particularly appropriate:
So I’m reading my daily Engadget and lo and behold, someone has developed a ‘Death Ray‘. Now I give props to the students at
First of all, it looks unwieldy. We make death rays in the form factor of a gun because that is what people are used to in a weapon. Larger death rays are of course mounted into orbital satellites but from the specs mentioned we’re not talking about a death ray intended to kill thousands, more of as tactical death ray.
And it needs a steel plate as a shield? Do you honestly think any serious user wants to walk around with a death ray that has a big steel plate on the front of it? Not only would you get laughed at, you would have a big steel plate interfering with your aim. Any decent death ray will have a tight enough beam that you won’t need a shield to protect yourself from the death ray, and shielding from the death rays of others is provided by specialized clothing, not big awkward steel plates.
In the end this work represents a good first effort for non-evil university students, but their work still has a long way to go if they want to produce something that is actually usable in the field.
I recently reconfigured our network to increase security. Before I got here, the last admin had arranged to tap into a sea bottom fiber trunk for our communications. It worked well and we have great bandwidth, but I wanted to isolate non-official traffic and make it less traceable, so I created a separate network with a series of email/browsing stations for the minions all connected via a satellite connection.
This setup works well because it keeps any foolishness on the part of the minions from affecting the more critical systems and also keeps out the do-gooders who happen to find a random terminal.
The problem came when the IDS logs showed a goodly amount of post scanning happening. A quick check showed that the port scanning was coming directly off a machine with no real attempt to hide the nature of the scan or mask the source. In essence, some dumb kid was learning Nmap against my satellite connection.
Now had I been in a good mood, I may have let it slide. Problem for the script kiddie is that I was not in a good mood. So I tracked down the address of our friend the script kiddie (don’t ask how), talked to the boss, and arranged a squad of shock troops and some transport. The boss was feeling frisky and allowed the resources as long as I got a good picture of the kid’s face.
So we’re hovering over this kid’s town in Armpit, WI and I check his traffic: sure enough, nice blatant port scan. I’m sure if I left him alone his ISP would eventually be explaining to his parents why they no longer had service, but this was going to be much more fun.
I let the shock troops go in first with instructions to take control but not rough anyone up. Once I get the all clear I borrow a pistol, walk in, and point it at the pimple-faced fifteen year old I find sitting on the couch and already quivering, then whip out my camera and take a picture for the boss’s sake.
“What’s your name?”
“J-J-J-Jason.”
“Well J-J-J-Jason, do you have a computer?”
“Y-Y-Yes…”
“Good. So Jason, are you familiar with Nmap?”
“Yes.”
“Good. You’ve been using Nmap lately, haven’t you Jason?”
“Yes.”
“I’m glad you’re being honest. Now Jason, you haven’t been using it exclusively on your own machines, have you Jason?”
“No.”
“No indeed, and I don’t like people port scanning my network Jason.”
At this point Jason’s father gets up the nerve to ask what was going on.
“Do you ever see reports on the news about people breaking into computers, deleting files, changing data, stealing credit card information?”
“You mean Hackers?”
“Not Hackers, Crackers. Hackers are people who try new things, develop…. never mind. The point is that Jason here is an aspiring Cracker, and he’s been playing with software that he shouldn’t.”
At this point the shock troops came out with Jason’s computer. It was a pretty nice rig with a decent LCD and an airbrushed case.
“Now you should all consider yourselves lucky. You see, if Jason had kept on the path of computer crime, he may have been arrested, you may have been sued. Instead, we’re just going to make sure that Jason doesn’t get into any trouble and assume that you will keep a closer watch on your son’s future computer usage.” With that I snapped my fingers and the shock troops headed out with Jason’s computer in tow.
As we flew away I checked the screen of my digital camera — the look on the kid’s face was priceless.
So research completes a new doomsday weapon and it’s time again to ransom the world. As much as I love the bonuses that come from a successful world ransom, I always hate dealing with the White House IT staff.
Every time we have to ransom the world, I get to deal with trying to configure a video conference with those jokers.
I’m just glad that Skype added video chat, seems to be the only solution that I can hammer into the IT guys. I just wish we could conference our demands to more world leaders at once, but we use AMD.
Now that I am finally out of the medical division I thought I would bring you up to speed on my last month.
A couple of days after I got back from EvilCon 06 I was relaxing in my suite when there was a knock on the door. I opened it and there was Katiana, ready to take me up on my offer for a little digital violence.
Not one to argue with a trained killer, I fired up the Xbox 360 and the projector. Gah, what to play? I tried Halo 2 but Katiana said she did not recognize the weapons. Ok, something a little more realistic then. I tried her on The Outfit, a fun little WWII game, and was not surprised when she chose the German female assassin in the tight leather pants and a rifle.
We tried a few more games and I was finally surprised when I threw on Super Monkey Ball and she loved it. After playing for half an hour, she stood up and announced she had to go (so much for scoring tonight).
So how did I wind up needing medical attention? As she left she told me that she would take me out later to play with ’some real toys’. That sounded interesting.
About a week later she was at my door again, telling me to get some shoes on and come with her (whatever you say dear). She took me down to the firing range to show me how to shoot a real gun. Hey, no problem, I’ve always been a killer on FPS and gun games.
So we start with pistols. She hands me a Walther P99, showed me how to line up the shot, and let me empty the magazine to practice, leaving my hands quite sore and the target unscathed (so much for games teaching you to be a killer).
We moved on to assault rifles, where Katiana showed what a lot of practice can do for accuracy, though I did manage to hit the target with a few rounds of the 20-30 I fired off.
Katiana then showed me how to use a tactical shotgun.
I don’t remember what happened after that, but when I woke up I found Katiana at my bedside looking bemused and guilty. Apparently after trying the shotgun as she instructed I decided to point it at the target Terminator style. Before she could warn me I pulled the trigger and, lacking terminator-strength arms, the gun kicked back and hit me in the head, knocking me into a coma that lasted until yesterday.
On the bright side, I got to wake up to the sight of the hottest assassin this side of anywhere.
I’ve finally arrived back from EvilCon08, and it was a blast. This year’s EvilCon was held in the lair of Dr. Slavotnik, a collection of old ballistic missile silos once used by the Russians. The location was easily dependable and much more thematic than last year’s event held at the Idaho Falls Holiday Inn (which was at least effective as a place where nobody would expect a convention of evil).
I delivered a session titled ‘Open Evil — The use of Open Source Software in an Evil Empire’ which was very well received by the attendees, especially the more technically minded evils. There were several good questions from the audience regarding whether Open Source software was evil enough, but having asked those questions myself I think the audience went away satisfied.
On a related note, the SCO booth at the tradeshow was easily the most popular booth this year. I love the trade show, you get wonderful swag in exchange for feigning interest in whatever the vendors are peddling. Since most booths are not IT related but more oriented around weapons I am not actually the target buyer for most of these guys, but that never stopped me from playing the game and getting some new toys. This year I really liked the exploding frisbees one of the weapons dealers was handing out — throw it and it adheres to whatever surface it hits, then push a button on your watch and it explodes like a shaped charge. Most of the swag is your standard fare of kevlar t-shirts and pen-guns, but the extra touch goes a long way.
I always like the atmosphere of EvilCon, it’s not full of petty thugs or family operations, instead the guest list is limited to those who work in evil either for the love of it or for the professional challenge. As a result there is no random mayhem, just people who love what they do and who want to share what they have learned so that together we all become more skilled.
I think the highlight was the closing keynote. Thanks to a generous sponsor, General Diabolik was busted out of his military prison and was present to deliver a session called “Never Say ‘Before I Kill You’ — Lessons Learned From the Fray”. It was a really great session that highlighted what happens when you become too cocky. There are several points I will be bringing up at our next strategic meeting like having the acid vats removed from the control room or at least getting some steel covers put on them.
All in all it was a great conference and I am really looking forward to next year’s event. Maybe one year I should look at even having it hosted here in the forbidden zone.
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