Newsgroups: comp.unix.admin
Path: utzoo!telly!rickc
From: rickc@telly.on.ca (Rick Copley)
Subject: How to crash your unix system.
Organization: Somewhere just far enough out of Toronto
Date: Wed, 20 Mar 91 17:15:16 GMT
Message-ID: <27E798A5.155D@telly.on.ca>

I recently downloaded some manpages for some utilities I have on the system.
They were in the format that nroff -man makes readable (I'm not sure what you 
would call the format but).  

I mistakenly typed in:
nroff -man sz  (sz being the binary executable program in the same directory
as the manpage listed below)

instead of nroff -man sz.1

I got "floating point execption" twice on my screen, and the entire system 
crashed with a "PANIC: floating point execption" on the system console.

The funny part is, I called NCR to complain and to this day they "have not been
able to duplicate the problem".  I have not tried it again, myself, but since
I have changed a few O/S releases and some other stuff, I wonder if it would 
happen again.

Oh yeah, the machine is an NCR Tower 32/800 running SYS V r2 (NCR# 01.03.01)
unix based on AT&T unix (NCR has mucked around with stuff to get it to run
on this multi-processor piece of junk).

rickc@telly.on.ca


-- 
#include <sys/types.h>
main()
{
  typedef long lotsa;
  lotsa *fun;
  time_t in;
  fun = (lotsa)hack(in);
}