In trouble with the admins

[Andy_83]

Just wondering, has anyone ever got themselves into trouble at work or any other place for messing with the computer setup?

I know you shouldn't, but who doesn't occasionally surf the net, or try to install something. It just seems I took it a bit far today

I was bored today, and messing around on my work pc (I have a 'debugger users' account in Windows, so I can generally mess with stuff). Anyway because there is a problem with my internet access, I decided to rename my computer to see if it was being blocked by its name by any chance. They have a naming convention there for the pcs (mine is 'DSK00012') so I went ahead and changed it to 'ZX81' lol. Anyway it asked me for an admin username/password, so I put in someone elses. Within 15 minutes, this other guy had recieved an email from IT telling him to put his computer name back to how it should be! lol He came around asking if anyone had used his account, so I said yeah, and we had a laugh about it but now IT have to come out tomorrow and put my pc right because they couldn't even access it remotely because I have killed the remote access service I have also completely customised the thing the way I would have it at home. I spent most of the afternoon deleting and uninstalling all the crap from it, so yeah i'm looking forward to tomorrow


edit: forgot to add, how the heck did they notice the name change within minutes of it happening? IT scare me sometimes...

[Steve R Jones]

Hope you get to keep your job

[Martin_89]

yeah its quite scarey that they notice things like that really quick.

i remember getting my mate banned from using the school computers because i showed him how to use net send to send messages to people and he done it to another mate when the teacher was helping him on the machine and he didnt know it shows the username from where it was sent i was ****ting myself because the teacher asked who showed him how to do it so she could avoid it happening, but gladly he didnt.

[Marvt74]

Heh i remember using winpopup during it i loved that program was loadsa fun.

Unlucky dude the it at my place are pretty good so i tend to not mess too much,

[Andy_83]

lol yeah I remember getting in trouble a few times at school. We had Acorn computers there, can't remember the model but the OS (Risc OS) was dated 1992 I think.

I remember a program I wrote, it went :

10 VDU RND
20 GOTO 10

This program, when run, would start to display hundreds of random characters on the screen. What was even more weird though, was that it set the room printer off printing sheets of rubbish - there was just a single line of random characters on each sheet. We had dot matrix printers back then, but when lasers were eventually installed, my program became a major problem whenever anyone ran it. The printers were regularly emptied of paper because for some reason once the program was run, the printer didn't stop until it was reset. Those were the days... (I used to sell it!) You just can't do stuff like that on Windows based pcs....

Can anyone explain why it even did that

[Martin_89]

well our school computers wern't that old, (P4 2.6GHz, 256MB ram Windows XP etc etc lol)

when mates had typed our somthing in school and put a header or footer on it, if they walked away we would go to print and set it to about 100 copys and the printers would go crazy. funny part was the person would get charged 2 pence per sheet of paper if they printed over 10 copys by mistake.

[Marvt74]

Bah just remember my and a mate having competitions to write macro's to see who could crash the computer the quickest

[CenturionStrategy]

You'll be fine mate. I used to work in many an IT department during student summers, and we used to give people cr*p for all sorts of menial things, knowing full well that we didn't care/the guys above us didn't care.

There was this one time when we explained the policy on computer games on work PCs to this guy after we did some maintenance on his PC and found a game installed, and the CD in the drive. My boss gave him a fair bit of grief and sent him on his way telling him not to do it again.

He came back about 20 mins later and asked if he could have his CD back. Unfortunately my boss had 'borrowed' it and was making it a copy of it at the time. DOH!

Another great story was of an IT team member managing to net send "eh?" to each of the 500+ PCs on site by accident. Whoops.

But yeah, at most you'll get an earfull, but to be honest it won't mean anything.

Nick

[Huge]

I timbuktu'ed into a friends machine at work. It was fun to hear him keep yelling "what the hell is wrong with this machine?" over and over again.

[TaNG]

I remember in high school someone went around installing some program on all the computers in the library. Think it was netbus or something. I was mucking around on it sending rude messages to random people. Little did I know I was sending messages to the people right opposite me. Then they called a teacher and I happen to walk pass their computer for some reason and I saw the screen was filled with popups FROM ME! Quickly ran to my computer and closed the program haha. Just in time for the teacher to come look at my computer and congratulate me on doing what I m supposed to be doing. HAR HAR.

[Andy_83]

lol

Well the admins haven't been out to see my machine yet. It's still ZX81... but yeah I should think i'll be ok! I doubt they really care afterall.

[TaNG]

Maybe it was one of them automated messages? Everything is automated these days.

[dannyboy27]

I remember winpopup, Marv. Such a great tool for flirting with the ladies in the office

It can be quite difficult being on the network admin side of things sometimes too.

I've been called out to sort out crashing PC's numerous times at work, done the usual spyware cleaning thing, and then found a load of "gentlemen's photography" on the PC. Always a bit of a tricky one, do you just get the user to delete it, or tell the Office manager?

I also used to get asked to produce web activity logs for one of our customers. We'd have a good laugh at some of the sites which had been visited, but at the same time you also knew it meant someone was in for a bollocking or maybe worse.

At the end of the day employees know the rules, so it's their own silly fault, but I didn't take any pleasure from dropping them in it.

[ThePerson98]

I remember when I was REALLY young, I mean in kindergarten and first grade, I learned how to get past all the mac's security stuff. There was this one fun game that people would always play on the computers, and they didnt like us playing it. They deleted it from the menu. I went into the hardrive and dug it up >_> I have never gotten in trouble though.

[fire]

I remember in computer class in high school we did a novell lab in which we were creating our own trees and we were told to unplug our computers form the network, someone in the class didnt and there dummy tree took over the real schools novell tree and thats caused alot of trouble for us.

One "stunt" that me and a few friends did in high school was to have a every 10-20 user that logns into the network start doing messages but with a loop so the network would over load its self, that was alot of fun on the last week before we graduated.