Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!husc6!mailrus!eecae!cps3xx!rang
From: rang@cpsin3.cps.msu.edu (Anton Rang)
Newsgroups: news.sysadmin
Subject: How do we get people to FIX things???
Message-ID: <1076@cps3xx.UUCP>
Date: 14 Nov 88 19:34:55 GMT
Sender: usenet@cps3xx.UUCP
Reply-To: rang@cpswh.cps.msu.edu (Anton Rang)
Distribution: na
Organization: Michigan State University, Computer Science Dept.
Lines: 21

I'm about ready to agree with Weemba about releasing the virus (or
something) every month.  A little looking around campus here indicates
that around 60% of our computers STILL have debugging enabled.  I
figure 20% were safe before (by virtue of not running BSD-derived
sendmails), so we managed to get about 1 out of 5 machines fixed up.
  Looking around the net (picking 5 machines at more-or-less random
out of /etc/hosts, until I had 5 which were reachable), one out of the
5 machines didn't know debug.  And that was because it never did in
the first place (IBM/VM system).  Several of these were at sites which
I *know* were hit in the initial infection.
  On our campus, I've been sending messages to 'postmaster' and/or
'root' in the vain hope something will get done.  I doubt it will,
though.  Maybe what we need is a worm which just sends back the
password file to a machine which mails out warnings to all the USERS
on the machine....
  I suppose it's hopeless...<sigh>...

+---------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+
| Anton Rang (grad student) | "UNIX: Just Say No!"   | "Do worry...be SAD!" |
| Michigan State University | rang@cpswh.cps.msu.edu |                      |
+---------------------------+------------------------+----------------------+