[PLUG] Graceful sudo recovery

Rich Shepard rshepard at appl-ecosys.com
Fri Aug 24 00:54:27 UTC 2012


On Thu, 23 Aug 2012, chris (fool) mccraw wrote:

> Back when I worked in a CS department with a thousand inquisitive
> students, ...

   In the early 1970s at the U. of Illinois (Champaign/Urbana) _all_ CS
students thought it was a right of passage to crash the IBM mainframes. This
was with Hollerith card decks, too, or the few terminals running 300 baud in
the room off the mainframe area. PITA, too.

   But, we grad students had our revenge. Toward the end of each semester the
CS100 and CS101 students would wait until the last minute to get their
projects run through the system. One course I took was in ecosystem modeling
and I'd written a rather large (2 card boxes worth) program in FORTRAN IV to
model energy flow through Cedar Lake, MN. It was not unusual during the week
before finals for someone to call my lab and ask me to walk my deck to the
remote job entry card reader in the building next door and run my model.
When it got to the front of the process queue it consumed all resources for
a few hours. Shortly thereafter I'd get a call from another grad student
that the system cleared out so I'd cancel my model and other grad students
could get their work done.

Rich





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