[Dngrsone]

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I have to assume the system could do enough to merit some form of job control, and that jobs might be submitted by different users, so some way of determining whose job it was was required.

Not really. I mean, as I said, one terminal. The computer was being used to operate an array of test equipment. There were a handful of subroutines that had to be running in the background (we're talking tens of individual components ranging from power supplies, measurement devices and switching to link it all together, using a half-dozen communications busses), but in the end, thre was only one user on the computer at any particular time.

I'm thinking that Harris found an excuse to offload some excess inventory and still fulfill their contract.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I was amused by the way various assumptions were embedded in the IBMsystem. Earlier machines got fed jobs on punch cards, and you put a deck of cards into a card reader to load into the machine. Punch cards were largely gone when I got involved (though the data cdenter did hve a card reader). Instead, what was sent to the mainframe was a file of 80 column card images. I dealt with text files that were members of a partitioned data set, and created edited those files to make and submit jobs. The first cards in the deck were JCL statements to let the machine know it was a job, what its name was, what data sets it used, and what programs would be run as part of the job stream.

Same here: there was a card reader interface, and theoretically there were card readers available (actually in one facility there was one on-hand, just not in my shop), and our software programs were written and structured for storage on punched cards, but really...

One of my instructors for the bench told us that our job (the one we were studying for) was a Cold war relic: should there be an nuclear blast (and accompanying EMP) that wiped out the data on our removable discs (those aforementioned 18" platters), then they could send out a card reader and stacks of cards and we could recompile all our programs and get running again. It sounded logical... in a Hollywood kind of way. Realistically, though, if the EMP were enough to penetrate several feet of steel to get to our platters and wipe them, then all the electronics in the entire test station would be crap, so they'd be shipping an entire bench or two, plus the software discs take up a lot less room and weigh less than an equivalent amount of punched-card data.

More likely is that Harris sold the card reader module with the computer or sold the government on the necessity to get rid of some of that excess inventory.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

An old friend once worked in a shop with two DEC PDP [b]1[/i]s. One was used for software development, and the other was used to play Spacewar. Someone decided only authorized users should be allowed to play Spacewar. So a programmer password protected the game, and told no one what it was. To play Spacewar, you had to go into the machine room, toggle front panel switches to put the system into single step debug mode, run Spacewar, step through the sequence till you got to where the password was input, figure out form what you saw what the password had to be, and enter it and play. If you were able to do that you were considered someone authorized to play Spacewar.

Hahaha. Yeah, I learned a lot more than most because when one of our guys left the shop he slipped a little something into the benches to mess with us: whenever someone loaded up a specific program (for the easiest thing we had to work on), the bench would essentially tell the tech to quick cherry-picking and go work on something important.

It took a little research, but I finally figured out and found the script he wrote. It resided on the system disc and since the system disc would be searched before the removable drive, his script would execute first. The script was basically print message, go to removable drive and execute.

It's the same as substituting a custom script for an actual bash command by placing your script in a higher-priority directory.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

What you essentially want to do is have the Motorola your access to the Uverse network, but have everything else done by a different system. So you put the Uverse into bridge mode, and all it does is serve as the gateway. Proving local IP addresses via DHCP, firewalling and the lake are done by another device, which gets a raw feed from the Motorala and sends stuff back out through it. You're taking the Motorola out of the loop as router, and having something else do it.

Exactly. The hack is basically exploiting a vulnerability on the modem and running commands as root, then using its nsh console to set it to true bridge mode, which is not possible through the public shell, by redirecting the PPP stream through one of the ethernet ports. reference

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

At one point, I was a Palm PDA connecting to my network. Everything else connected through WPA2 encryption, but the Palm only did WEP. I wasn't about to lower the security on my network, so I set up a second router configured as a bridge. It was seen as a trusted client by the main one. The PDA connected to the second modem, which forwarded the traffic through the master. DHCP, firewalling, and the like all happened on the main unit. When the PDA wasn't connected, the second unit was off. (I also turned on MAC address filtering on the second router so only the PDA could connect, and turned off SSID broadcast, to reduce likelihood of anyone in range seeing and connecting through it. I saw advice back when that if your security choices were WEP or none, use none so you wouldn't be under the illusion you were protected. )

Been there, done that: Palm T|X for close to eight years before I was forced to use a 'smart' phone.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

The legal way I can see is used by the link I pointed to - put the Moto into bridge mode and have its functions performed by something else. I'd also look at getting a replacement modem. I'm not aware of anything special about Uverse that only the Motorola should work. This strikes me as AT&T being lazy and trying to reduce support issues. The question, if you found a compatible replacement, was whether they would even notice if you substituted.

I doubt they'd care, unless it caused them problems on their end. Of course, any issues I'd encounter would be pawned off on the unsupported modem and therefore be not their problem.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

I have Tor here, though I'm not playing with VPNs at the moment. Tor establishes an encrypted connection on a high port number to a Tor entry point, traffic is routed through multiple internal Tor network nodes, and proceeds to your destination from a Tor exit node. What the other ensd sees as your origin is the address of the Exit node, not yours. And your route through the internal Tor network changes periodically The intent is to make it impossible to trace your traffic back to you. In essence, Tor is an anonymous proxy with additional obfuscation in the proxy.

Right. The onion routers remember where your machine is and route packets accordingly (I'm being overly simplistic, I know). Is this not the same as network address translation? I mean, my router remembers where my machine is at and routes the packets that belong to it accordingly... as far as AT&T knows (in my case), all data is being requested by and sent to one single IP, the router. It's the router's job to figure out which packets belong to my machine and which belong to the Playstation, or to the television.

Originally Posted by DMcCunney

Let us know how you make out.

I certainly will do so.