Once upon a time, we had several Sun Enterprise 450s that my college used to teach Oracle to students. It was well underutilized and the hit game Quake had come out. Of course we, the IT support staff, ran a Quake server and invited all of our friends to play on it. Imagine our surprise when one of our professors we support came into our office and said "Hey our Oracle instance is very slow, can you guys take a look at it?". Whoops, we shutdown the quake server and he later sent an email "I don't know what magic you guys did, but the performance is amazing!".
Another fun one, not targeted at professors, but at our student compute lab. We had a lab of 25 Sparc Ultra 60s that was pretty well utilized. Well one day, before I became a sysadmin, I was thinking to myself "all of these servers are rsh enabled, what if I logged into all of them". So I wrote a script that would cut up an AU file (sun's audio format) into tiny parts and then wrote a program that would synchronize with each other and play a different part out of a different workstation. I vividly remember playing a screaming sound in a ring around the entire room at a low volume before playing the entire sound out of the three middle workstations at full volume a few seconds later. The lab was full. At least 15 people immediately noped out. I was sitting in the back cracking up.
Another time the sysadmins of the same computer lab left rwalld running. So I sent an rwall "The system will shutdown in 5 minutes" or whatever the shutdown message was. The professor at the time got angry "they always do this, they perform maintenance whenever the g.d. please" and he stormed out of the room. Suddenly the professor and an angry IT administrator was peering in the door and pointing at me. They threatened to revoke all of my access which would cause me to fail out. I just shrugged, I knew what they were up against and instead asked to work for them. The anger turned to surprise and I worked there for almost 6 years before leaving for greener pastures.
Another fun one, not targeted at professors, but at our student compute lab. We had a lab of 25 Sparc Ultra 60s that was pretty well utilized. Well one day, before I became a sysadmin, I was thinking to myself "all of these servers are rsh enabled, what if I logged into all of them". So I wrote a script that would cut up an AU file (sun's audio format) into tiny parts and then wrote a program that would synchronize with each other and play a different part out of a different workstation. I vividly remember playing a screaming sound in a ring around the entire room at a low volume before playing the entire sound out of the three middle workstations at full volume a few seconds later. The lab was full. At least 15 people immediately noped out. I was sitting in the back cracking up.
Another time the sysadmins of the same computer lab left rwalld running. So I sent an rwall "The system will shutdown in 5 minutes" or whatever the shutdown message was. The professor at the time got angry "they always do this, they perform maintenance whenever the g.d. please" and he stormed out of the room. Suddenly the professor and an angry IT administrator was peering in the door and pointing at me. They threatened to revoke all of my access which would cause me to fail out. I just shrugged, I knew what they were up against and instead asked to work for them. The anger turned to surprise and I worked there for almost 6 years before leaving for greener pastures.
Ahh the SunOS days were really the days of yore