[24251] in Hotline Meeting
how putting ".mit.edu" in the wrong place can totally hose a Sun
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Alex T Prengel)
Wed Sep 14 17:26:33 1994
To: hotline@MIT.EDU, dot@MIT.EDU, miki@MIT.EDU, wdc@MIT.EDU
Cc: alexp@MIT.EDU, vrt@MIT.EDU, larugsi@MIT.EDU, burke@MIT.EDU,
hoffmann@MIT.EDU
Date: Wed, 14 Sep 1994 17:26:18 EDT
From: Alex T Prengel <alexp@MIT.EDU>
We have just resolved a problem that at least four people spent between 1-2
hours working on and that resulted in an unnecessary hardware service call.
I added ".mit.edu" to a hostname entry in /etc/hosts for my machine
(dit), changing the entry from just "18.172.1.245 dit" to
"18.172.1.245 dit.mit.edu". This did no apparent damage right away,
but the next time the machine rebooted it caused strange networking
error messages that looked like a hardware problem, resulting in a
hardware service call.
This is something that potentially any user who has write permission
on the local disk could do.
The reason I did this involved working with a vendor who wanted to set
a domain string in a license server key file to include ".mit.edu";
the reason for that was to prevent users on the net from taking MIT
licenses (in this case, the restriction would have been a lot more
to the vendor's advantage than ours).
Many many thanks to burke, larugsi, hoffmann and vrt (who finally
figured out the problem)! Beware!
Alex
