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I saw it happen in 2004. The University of Bristol has some strange options on their machines, such as home directories being globally readable unless you chang

I saw it happen in 2004. The University of Bristol has some strange options on their machines, such as home directories being globally readable unless you change it yourself (failure to do so isn't a defence if someone plaigarises your work), but the strangest one I saw was the total lack of ulimits on shared machines. Every time someone tried to su the IT staff would show up and ask them what exactly they thought they were up to. That went a long way to instilling the idea that you shouldn't mess about doing things you shouldn't on communal hardware.

jackweirdy 12y ago
> such as home directories being globally readable unless you change it yourself Also the case at University of Birmingham. Must be a default somewhere
- cja 12y ago
  At Durham University in 2000, "net send hello" at a Windows command prompt caused a message box to appear on every Windows computer on the uni network. I gave myself up to the bewildered IT department immediately.
  - noisy_boy 12y ago
    Reminds me off my early days of discovering Unix commands. Except this was on my first job in a Bank running SCO Unix; a decidedly less forgiving environment than a University. I was the unofficial assistant sysadmin (long story) and running banner "hello"|wall in the middle of a busy day at the branch caused a fair bit of confusion. Thankfully we were a young bunch and sysadmin let me off with a somewhat stern warning.