2011? Oh yeah..just noticed that I haven’t posted anything for a month. The start of the year is always hard for any system admin not withstanding the fact that the end of the year was marked by the release of Fedora 14 (my laptop ), RHEL 6 and Spacewalk 1.2. Now RHEL 6 has been long due and the wait was well worth it but unfortunately because of some arrogant companies like Oracle life becomes difficult and I have to go around compiling ASM libraries to test RAC compatibility on RHEL 6 when Oracle could have released the packages when their own Unbreakable (??) Kernel already supports 2.6.3x series. Besides the wait for CentOS 6 is also killing me, there is such a lack of transparency in the project that you can never say when it will be out which leaves me with Scientific Linux Alpha and Beta releases to play with. Spacewalk is another baby I would like to be running but I’ll wait for CentOS 6 to be out to have a clear upgrade policy and consistent OS version across systems.

Now coming back to why I initially chose to write this post, I read a post by Vincent Danen about a LUG member who posted a rather amusing article especially for anyone who considers himself a hacker and wants to see what the defining characteristics of a hacker was 10 years ago. Whether this was something serious or something tongue in cheek, it’s an amusing read nonetheless.

“Is your son obsessed with “Lunix”?

BSD, Lunix, Debian and Mandrake are all versions of an illegal hacker operation system, invented by a Soviet computer hacker named Linyos Torovoltos, before the Russians lost the Cold War. It is based on a program called “xenix”, which was written by Microsoft for the US government. These programs are used by hackers to break into other people’s computer systems to steal credit card numbers. They may also be used to break into people’s stereos to steal their music, using the “mp3? program. Torovoltos is a notorious hacker, responsible for writing many hacker programs, such as “telnet”, which is used by hackers to connect to machines on the internet without using a telephone.

Your son may try to install “lunix” on your hard drive. If he is careful, you may not notice its presence, however, lunix is a capricious beast, and if handled incorrectly, your son may damage your computer, and even break it completely by deleting Windows, at which point you will have to have your computer repaired by a professional.

If you see the word “LILO” during your windows startup (just after you turn the machine on), your son has installed lunix. In order to get rid of it, you will have to send your computer back to the manufacturer, and have them fit a new hard drive. Lunix is extremely dangerous software, and cannot be removed without destroying part of your hard disk surface.