I love the incredibly vague job title "Member, Technical Staff" I had at Sun. It could cover anything from kernel hacking to HVAC repair!
At least I had root access to my own workstation (and everybody else's in the company, thanks to the fact that NFS actually stood for No File Security).
[In the late 80's and early 90's, NFSv2 clients could change their hostname to anything they wanted before doing a mount ("hostname foobar; mount server:/foobar /mnt ; hostname original"), and that name would be sent in the mount request, and the server trusted the name the client claimed to be without checking it against the ip address, then looked it up in /etc/exports, and happily returned a file handle.
If the NFS server or any of its clients were on your local network, you could snoop file handles by putting your ethernet card into promiscuous mode.
And of course NFS servers often ran TFTP servers by default (for booting diskless clients), so you could usually read an NFS server's /etc/exports file to find out what client hostnames it allowed, then change your hostname to one of those before mounting any remote file system you wanted from the NFS server.
And yes, TFTP and NFS and this security hole you could drive the space shuttle through worked just fine over the internet, not just the local area network.]
When the Morris worm went around, one of the ways it got in was through sendmail, using the "DEBUG" command. Right after it happened, some wise-ass sent around an email telling everybody to edit their sendmail binary (with Emacs of course), search for "DEBUG", and replace the "D" will a NULL, thus disabling the "DEBUG" command.
What that actually did was change the "DEBUG" command into the "" command.
At the time I was running a mailing list from the University of Maryland, and often had to check Sun email addresses by telnetting to sun.com port 25, pressing return a couple of times to flush the telnet negotiation characters, then going "EXPN some-email-address".
So the day after the Morris worm, I go "telnet sun.com 25", hit return a couple of times, then "EXPN foobar", and it dumps out a huge torrent of debugging information, because I had accidentally switched it into debug mode by entering a blank line!
I reported it to postmaster@sun.com, and they fixed it. But it's kinda silly that they would have applied such a ham fisted patch to their sendmail demon like that, based on an email that some dude on the internet sent around!
