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It's funny. Laugh. Idle

Manager Disables Web Server by Sneaking Away Xbox 129

Posted by CmdrTaco from the solve-with-a-post-it-note dept.
nz17 writes "While the administrator is away the managers will play. A custom Web server went missing at an unnamed public university, but who was the culprit? The department manager. Thinking that the Linux Web server (which used a Microsoft Xbox for its hardware) was a normal game console, he snuck the device out of the server room and home for his son to play over the holiday weekend. The philosophy students who used the server for their class were not amused."
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Manager Disables Web Server by Sneaking Away Xbox More

Manager Disables Web Server by Sneaking Away Xbox

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  • Philosophy students (Score:5, Funny)

    by Gothmolly ( 148874 ) on Monday May 26, 2008 @09:40AM (#23544451)
    What were they doing with it, sitting around asking 'what is the sound of 1 Xbox playing?' Philosophy kids don't actually DO anything, esp. on weekends, so whats all the outrage?

  • The article is dated May 28, 2006 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 26, 2008 @09:41AM (#23544459)
    And this is news how?

    • Re:The article is dated May 28, 2006 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Rurik ( 113882 ) on Monday May 26, 2008 @09:48AM (#23544531)
      I think we need to start slashbombing the submitters of these articles. I doubt /. has a backlog of submissions two years old, so people need to stop submitting old crap to this site.

      We're looking at YOU, nz17

      • Re:The article is dated May 28, 2006 (Score:4, Informative)

        by Khyber ( 864651 ) <techkitsune@gmail.com> on Monday May 26, 2008 @11:18AM (#23545319) Homepage Journal
        You must be new here. Old shit on the weekends is the norm for this site.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by 1u3hr ( 530656 )
        The editors, if they notice the date at all, are often suckered by this trick of some submitters of using an article with today's date, several years ago.
        • Except today's date is May 26, 2008, not May 28.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by carlzum ( 832868 )
          Even if the submitter was trying to fool the editors it wasn't a very convincing trick. The date appears clear-as-day above the article's headline. The submitter could have just as easily missed the year of the article, but I'd fault the editor for the miss.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by 1u3hr ( 530656 )
            Even if the submitter was trying to fool the editors it wasn't a very convincing trick. The date appears clear-as-day above the article's headline. The submitter could have just as easily missed the year of the article, but I'd fault the editor for the miss.

            It convinced the editors. Of course the date is "clear as day" to anyne who reads it, which the editors apparently hardly ever do. But I'm sure it was noticed by and deliberately chosen by the submitter, using a date so close to today. How could they

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by nz17 ( 601809 )
        Here's a newsflash, Bucko: I didn't submit this to Slashdot Idle, I submitted this to the IT section under the "It's funny, laugh." topic. If you guys have something better I'd rather read it, so please submit it to Slashdot and have it get promoted or voted up to the front page.

        And for the other posters talking about how this is an old story posted on a different site two years later, I did not know that when I submitted it. I merely saw it as highly ranking on Digg's Technology section and thought the S

    • Re:The article is dated May 28, 2006 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by xaxa ( 988988 ) on Monday May 26, 2008 @09:52AM (#23544573)
      How do we ignore idle./. stories? I'd like to turn them off the same way I can turn off Apple stories (for instance).

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by somersault ( 912633 )
        Since this is the idle channel and I keep seeing your name/ID popping up I'd like to say how cool I think it is :p I wonder if xa maps to 988 in any way. Anyway, I thought you could specify how important stories from different sections are to you? For example for me the gaming stories show the title but not the summary. I can't even remember what the settings were like when I did that, they may have made them more comprehensive by now.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by xaxa ( 988988 )
          xaxa/988988 is complete fluke, I didn't notice it myself until someone (possibly you?) pointed it out.

          I had a look at the settings, you can specify how important you think stories from each section are, except idle. (The settings are on http://slashdot.org/help [slashdot.org] -- choose 'Sections'.) :)
          • Probably wasn't me, though I do have a weird fascination with the user IDs :p I can't help but think that those with cooler IDs tend to stick around longer, that may just be because I only notice the interesting ones though. It gets even more interesting when people use numbers for their name too. Someone took the username 24601 already, I don't think I've seen the actual user ID 24601 being used though.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by brianosaurus ( 48471 )
        $ grep slashdot /etc/hosts
        127.0.0.1 idle.slashdot.org
        $
    • Not only that, but even then someone was just repeating an urban legend. This never happened.
      • No kidding. Had this happened, someone would know by now where it happened. Anyone who has been on the web for any amount of time should know that vague stories are usually falsies.

  • Great Story (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Was a great story when it came out in 2006!

  • Oooold (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    I heard this one way back in 2004. Old story is old.

  • Linux on Xbox (Score:5, Funny)

    by noz ( 253073 ) on Monday May 26, 2008 @09:44AM (#23544491)
    Another reason to run Windows servers.

  • Please, Please Stop (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 26, 2008 @09:53AM (#23544581)
    No more stupid stories, please.

    • Re:Please, Please Stop (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Bryan Ischo ( 893 ) on Monday May 26, 2008 @02:01PM (#23547205) Homepage
      I'm afraid you're not going to get your wish. I had an email discussion with CmdrTaco on this subject last summer. He basically admitted that during the 'lull time' of U.S. summer, they have to scrape around for articles to post because summer time means far fewer cool university publications, and businesses release fewer products and stuff during summer as well.

      I specifically complained about kdawson and the drivel that he posts but CmdrTaco defended him by saying that he (CmdrTaco) though that he (kdawson) did 'a pretty good job' as an editor.

      Really, at that point, I realized that there is nothing that anyone can do. I mean, if you can defend kdawson's editing and story submission quality, then I guess you can defend anything.

      I don't know how long the average user lasts on Slashdot before getting fed up and moving on; the first 5 years I read Slashdot it steadily improved in quality but the last 5 years have been all downhill. I'm really starting to reach my limit of tolerance for it. Many days I say to myself, "that's it, I'm not reading Slashdot at all anymore", but old habits die hard and I keep coming back.

      • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

        by Anonymous Coward
        What I can't understand is how people take a boring article on /. so goddamn personal.

        You are not entitled to anything. If you think it's boring, don't waste your time on it. It is just that simple.

        This is really the same as "if you don't like what's on right now, change the channel". Don't spend your time crying like a child in the forums about how you want everything to be a certain way. Just fuck off and read the next article.

        Christ you people are sad. Go play on digg where that crybaby shit is the

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by mikael ( 484 )
        Summer tends to be the conference season - SIGGRAPH etc...
      • True enough, if only it were possible for people to filter content themselves. You know, but some sort of thought process - unfortunately that is not the case, without some form of scripting all we can do is read Slashdot beginning to end, good or bad.

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by 1u3hr ( 530656 )
        I'm afraid you're not going to get your wish. I had an email discussion with CmdrTaco on this subject last summer.

        I used to send corrections to them -- typos, dupes, factual errors, and such. About half the time they did then fix them. But Taco was very bitchy and unappreciative about it. I realised I was just being an unpaid proofreader for lazy jerks who didn't give a shit, so I gave up. Now I just ignore their errors or snark about them in the comments.

        The comment moderation is the thing that makes

  • Holiday Qualitay (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TheRedSeven ( 1234758 ) on Monday May 26, 2008 @09:54AM (#23544595)
    ...is low as usual--a two-year old article, posted to Idle, makes the front page.

    At least this line actually made me laugh:

    excrement encountered the rotary cooling device
  • It didn't surprise me when I saw this 2-year-old news item on Digg yesterday, but here? Sheesh...
  • Is the xbox cheaper than the old celeron in the basement?

    Btw: stuff that matters, duh.

  • Aaaagghhh! Make it stop! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by iminplaya ( 723125 ) on Monday May 26, 2008 @10:20AM (#23544817) Journal
    Keep the damn idle OFF the front page! At the VERY least, let me block it!

    • Re: (Score:1, Interesting)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Mod parent up. Idle needs to GTFO the front page.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by ZorinLynx ( 31751 )
      This story was amusing! Why is everyone bitching about it?

      Gods, people, get a grip. If a story doesn't interest you, DON'T FREAKING CLICK ON IT. Duhh. It's not rocket science.

      This is the same attitude that people have when they want to ban/censor TV shows and video games they don't like.

      If you don't like it, ignore it.

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        by iminplaya ( 723125 )
        I can't block it off the front page. It's a spam bucket taking up valuable space. It's not on the list of things I CAN block. Make it an option, and I'll keep quiet. One of the things that made the site better than most was the lack of garbage like this. Now it's just becoming some cutesy teenybopper site. Just you watch the kind of people this will attract as the tech articles drift off into the background. It's already happening. And the look of the idle page is positively ghastly. The pink ponies look be

        • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

          by iminplaya ( 723125 )
          (Score:0, Offtopic)

          Oh jeeze! Modded by an idle worshiper. Go back to facebook, or wherever the hell you came from. We don't want you in our sandbox.

          Slashdot is being AOLed. It's worse than death
      • If you don't like it, ignore it.

        If I had to do that, how would that make Slashdot any different from digg?

  • Reminds me of the old saying... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Noryungi ( 70322 ) on Monday May 26, 2008 @10:21AM (#23544825) Homepage Journal
    "Sure, you have got a PhD. Just don't touch anything".

  • A old desktop likey is faster then the x-box (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Joe The Dragon ( 967727 ) on Monday May 26, 2008 @10:35AM (#23544947)
    So why can't they just use one for the sever?
  • Why the hell was the server running on an Xbox?

    I mean, it might be a funny thing, a cool home-made project or a public internet demostration but serously.. running an university server on an XBox? WTH were they thinking? [ironic]I guess the university doesn't get enough founds to buy a proper server so teachers have to take its personal entertainment servers to work or otherwise they can have a server for their classes.[/ironic]

    Guess what? The manager should be awarded for discovering a critical secur
  • ...why the department manager didn't confiscate this XBox as contraband.

    Seriously, what's a game console doing in the server room? There are no other alternatives? No leftover hardware (PIII-almost-anything, P4-anythinbg at-all, Athlon-ditto) more than capable of doing the job?

    The article was replete with references to the lack of respect management had for the proletariat IT staff, blahblahblahblahblah. Feh.

    Labeling equipment in the server room is crucial. How about a decent label if, for no other reas

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by menace3society ( 768451 )
      My guess would be that years ago some CS people got a small grant to buy an Xbox and put Linux on it, as a sort of exercise in hacking. It's all well an exciting the first time you do it, but afterwards all you've got is another Linux server, only in an XBox case. So they put it in a server room, set it up to host the philosophy department's webpage, and forgot about it.

      What bugs me the most is that someone who is an IT department manager saw something in the server room that was plugged in, on the networ

      • What bugs me the most is that someone who is an IT department manager w something in the server room that was plugged in, on the network, and turned on, and decided to turn it off and disconnect it without so much as asking someone.

        That's why this story just doesn't ring true. The article says "The manager had thought the X-Box was just a games console that the IT departments staff used for recreation when it got quiet. Noticing that the X-Box hadn't been moved from the server room for some time and that hi

        • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

          by Arimus ( 198136 )

          I know people will do some stupid things, but my bs detecter tells me it's one of those urban legends.

          If only... A long while back I was working as a programmer with 3 days in the office and 2 at home. One day while working at home I noticed our CM system had dropped off the face of the earth...

          Drove into work and found that a manager who was using the table in the corner of our lab had decided the server was too noisy while he was trying to work and unplugged it.

          And before people say why wasn't in a server

    • Seriously, what's a game console doing in the server room? There are no other alternatives? No leftover hardware (PIII-almost-anything, P4-anythinbg at-all, Athlon-ditto) more than capable of doing the job?

      Because it's cheap, and readily available [ebay.com], and widely popular [google.com]. If you don't care what the box itself looks like, a computer is a computer is a computer and if the admin of that particular boxen decided to use cheap, readily available, and widely supported hardware to run their server on, that's their dec

      • In my current environment (fortune 50) no machine can be even brought into any of the datacenters (and ours are on the small side) without prior permission, full identification, and labeling for owner, business unit, name assigned, and emergency constacts (2 or more 24-7-365 no matter the actual support hours permitted). Hardware need not be new, but it cannot be anything unapproved.

        This is not my first gig in a strict environment. Classified military systems are more restrictive, with one site I was on ha

  • Kudos to the admin (Score:5, Funny)

    by Goalie_Ca ( 584234 ) on Monday May 26, 2008 @10:47AM (#23545061)
    He did what no philosophy student could. He proved that the box exists!

  • WTF - An X-BOX?! (Score:1, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There's no way that was cost effective, unless someone pulled it out of the trash. A generic "white" box could easily be had for under $200, and would be far more suitable for a server.

    The admin got what he deserved. The IT Manager was right to pull that piece of crap out of the rack.

    It would have been worse if it were an XBox 360. We all know how friggin' reliable they have been.

    The admin is no hero here. He was a stupid fool from the start.

    • A generic "white" box could easily be had for under $200
      And you can buy an Xbox for $50 from someone that just upgraded to an X-Box 360. Chances are this was a donation to the school (tax deductable). I don't imagine the philosophy department gets a lot of funding for hardware, so they'll use whatever they can get for free.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by hiruhl ( 1171697 )
        Dean, to the computer science department: "Why do I always have to give you guys so much money, for software licenses and expensive hardware and stuff? Why couldn't you be like the math department - all they need is money for pencils, paper and waste-paper baskets. Or even better, like the philosophy department. All they need are pencils and paper."
  • I guess those Philosophy students never heard the saying, "Shit Happens, Get a Helmet".
  • This was on digg TWO days before posting here. If you guys can't keep your content original, I suggest you make way for somebody that can, Taco.

    • Re:Fucking Digg submissions (Score:4, Insightful)

      by ChowRiit ( 939581 ) on Monday May 26, 2008 @11:31AM (#23545477)
      Who cares what's been or not been on Digg? I read slashdot for my tech news, if they started only publishing stories that hadn't been published anywhere else, we wouldn't get much news...

      Now, a 2 year old Idle story being forced onto everyone's front page, that's a better thing to moan about...
  • ... there is a philosophy lesson in all this .... somewhere...
    • No, it's actually just an English lesson - "snuck" is not a real freaking word and the editor should have used "sneaked". Although... I suppose there could be a deeper meaning... but this is Idle and no here really cares about the content anyway :P
  • Instead of playing on the Xbox with his son, he should perhaps read him some fairy tales.

    Many fairy tales emphasize the importance of not messing with things you don't understand and not taking other people's possessions.

    (Here's another hint from the fairy tales: if the Xbox doesn't turn into a beautiful princess after the first kiss, stop kissing it. I don't know what it means, but it seemed relevant.)
    • (Here's another hint from the fairy tales: if the Xbox doesn't turn into a beautiful princess after the first kiss, stop kissing it. I don't know what it means, but it seemed relevant.)

      Peter: So you understand all these gifts were supposed to be for my family. It was just some crazy mix-up.

      Hick Mother: Kill 'em.

      Hick Father: [Pumps shotgun]

      Peter: No, no, no. It's true. You see, that remote control cow was for my son. And those barrettes were for my daughter. And, uh.... Hey, where's my VCR?

      Hick C

  • I work at a university, and while money is often tight it's not THIS tight. Their "IT staff" sounds like its comprised of a bunch of little boys. Who'd choose to run an official department service off an Xbox? Even if the "IT staff" are kids - if the department can afford paying them even minimum wage, it can easily afford an inexpensive computer/server.

    If this is true, it sounds more like a bunch of kids playing at IT. It's not just the use of the Xbox; but they also apparently didn't tell anyone which box
    • Look at TFA: it's in a column called "Hyperbole, Embellishment, and Sys Admins". Other articles in this section include A report from a north pole sysadmin [windowsitpro.com] about Santa Claus' data centre. These are literally FAIRY TALES. As for the X-Box story, no names, dates, institutions named. And consider a manager who could know how to pull the X-Box out of the rack, unplug the networking, would know enough to realise that it was not set up as a game machine, but a server. What manager would be so insane as to risk hi
  • Why does idle define Arial as a default font? Slashdot has, for years, just defined sans-serif, and respected what the browser has set for it.
  • serves him right

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