

Doom as a tool for system administration - RiderOfGiraffes
http://www.cs.unm.edu/~dlchao/flake/doom/

======
ramchip
I thought this would be about...

 _SNMP management is a damn fine tool for network computers, especially when
it lets you reboot them remotely. I patch a game of Network Doom with sprites
of the users' faces and get the kills piped to the SNMP reboot command...

I ring the users and tell them, to give them as much of a chance as you can
get using the server copy of the game which only lets you pick up a handgun
with one round of ammo. Still, a beancounter can get good at pistol shooting
when two hours of spreadsheet work is at stake and you have to win a game in
order to ungrey the SAVE button (another little patch).

By Friday, the results are in. Surprisingly enough, the NCs weren't a hit with
the users and were replaced with PCs after only four days. Oh, and 327
kills..._

<http://bofh.ntk.net/Bastard_1998-1b.html>

------
voidpointer
You guys do realize that this is from 1999, don't you? It was really funny
back in the day but I though everybody knew this by now ;)

~~~
kajecounterhack
Well, I appreciate it. I was 9 years old and had no idea.

~~~
voidpointer
Which shows that we're not dying out. Yay!

------
flatline
"after I took the screenshot of myself being attacked by csh, csh was shot by
friendly fire from behind, possibly by tcsh or xv, and my session was abruptly
terminated."

Definitely my favorite part. I think the data modeling within the game engine
still needs some work...

------
amohr
What struck me about the article was the attribution of the concept of
cyberspace to Vernor Vinge instead of Gibson. After some wikipedia
investigation, it's clear that my sci-fi history knowledge is lacking - True
Names came out a full 3 years before Neuromancer.

However, Gibson is still credited with giving the name "cyberspace" to this
artificial world (Vinge called it the "Other Plane"). I'm wholly disappointed
with my sci-fi professor now for leaving out this bit.

------
curiousgeorge
"This work was funded by the National Science Foundation through a BIO
Research Training Group in Ecological Complexity (NSF 9553623)."

------
lallysingh
Two favorite bits:

\- Important processes can be instantiated as more powerful monsters. They can
then defend themselves against inexperienced sysadmins.

\- Certain processes are vital to the computer's operation and should not be
killed. For example, after I took the screenshot of myself being attacked by
csh, csh was shot by friendly fire from behind, possibly by tcsh or xv, and my
session was abruptly terminated.

------
adammarkey
The question is: which windows process is most likely to become "the
cyberdemon"? --> <http://doom.wikia.com/wiki/Cyberdemon>

I'm going to go ahead and vote for "Outlook.exe"

------
Dilpil
Are there ninja monsters who disguise themselves to look the same as
svchost.exe? And mysterious otherworldly processes with names made up of ever
changing random strings of letters and numbers who cannot be killed by force
alone?

Only on windows I guess.

------
andr
Looks very cool. However, in the age of cloud computing, if you need to
constantly look at "ps aux" on each server you run, you are doing it wrong.

------
theklub
This is awesome.

