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