What Lives Behind The Blue Screen | Human Readable

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[Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] the most merciful thing in the world i think is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents but what of these modern times of connectivity with the ease of piecing together of disassociated knowledge can any information be safely sequestered away fragmented and separated never to come together and burrow in the minds of men my knowledge of such things began in the time of yore almost time immemorable during my tenure at initech it was where i discovered the madness that lurks in my mind my soul my dreams even to this day the madness i pray that can be excised with this story that through writing these words i may achieve from the catharsis and perhaps at least peace [Music] i was a technician at initech at first a lowly one but then increasingly senior as the company saw greater and greater success the company grew larger its tendrils hungry to feed off more it drew in more resources more people each more diverse than the last in both personality and physical location entire companies were joined to inattech by way of merger and acquisition innotech's infrastructure grew in lockstep servers were purchased remote locations came online and the catalyst of this fateful tale an alliance with ibm [Music] [Music] in an amount of time far swifter than the humble technician like me was ever used to a wave of blue change swept through in attack but suffice to say everything became ibm innotect's erp was changed and now ran on aix the blue giant's own flavor of unix with the changes done in attack turned its new infrastructure and capabilities on min attack a large competitor and swooped upon it to perform the inevitable and unavoidable acquisition but while the leaders and scholars of innotech were looking out technicians such as i were looking in in those tumultuous days with so many of our people being remote but all of our resources being centralized remote consoles were the only way to bring both together employees connected to the erp software via telnet using the corn shell occasionally well far more often than the world would imply something would go haywire with the dial-up connection the modem would misbehave the phone line would be too noisy or perhaps just fate would intervene in its mysterious ways the connection would be assaulted with electrical noise spraying the current working directory with an acidic wash of random ascii my methods and designs beyond my ken would wander too close to a cat command and end up in the wrong side of a pipe it was on the eve of the acquisition of minitech when i looked too far inwards with only the best of intentions i wanted to welcome our new minitech brethren to a system that was not littered with these abominations that lay foul to our erp these malformed files had always been a horror i tried to see only in my periphery something i acknowledged existed but did everything in my conscious power to avoid interacting with but i was interacting with systems during the merging and these things were ubiquitous pieces of madness strewn about like little things like moats in the corner of your eye tiny unnoticed until they're noticed then you cannot unsee them i was driven but i did not know how to excise these devils how can you drive away that which you cannot even address directly so in my thrice damned cleverness i devised a workaround one that could only be born somewhere in the continuum of a youthful bravado and outright insanity before this incident i could excuse my behavior as the former but afterwards i can only dare to hope to escape from the latter which i know pulls at my hind brain even to this day i could not refer to those modern noise files directly by name but through the wonders of scripting i could enumerate the extent of respectably named files in a directory with arrogant keystrokes i created a script that created a temporary folder elsewhere and it tucks away all the proper files into that encompassing safety of its embrace and then in a single fell swoop banish the malformed miscreants into the ether with a single rm star command i ran my precious foolish script on a directory or two and it worked a wonder the directories at long last were pure clean swept free like a warm sweet wind lifting the heavy lung scalding smog from the valley it worked well and i congratulated myself but oh hubris i knew cleaning a few personal directories would not be enough there was an entire file system that over the many epochs of time had been defiled upon by foulness it was everywhere and at last i could fix it i unleashed my script like the furious right hand of the archangels themselves directory after directory expunged and it worked perfectly everywhere everywhere that is until i discovered modem noise files in the root directory in a hazy stupor like being drunk on the power i wielded i turned my script on the root directory and unleashed it [Music] i never made it past the first step though perhaps a small part of my brain realized only after the command had been executed what the connotations of what i'd done were surely dear listener as a experienced unix system admin you can probably already feel the horror that only dawned on me like a rising tide my terminal froze locked up with a sudden bone-jarring stalk a chilling realization emerged in me it became clear with each flashing of the pulsing yet now lifeless cursor server must have been using those files [Music] [Applause] so [Music] in the glow of only the infernal useless terminal and the midnight moon streaming into the office i nearly wept that this could happen was impossible it must have been a simple glitch not unlike those line hiccups that had caused those demon files in the first place but my terminal did not reboot i was overcome with near mortal anguish the visions of thousands of users lost adrift disconnected for eternity all because of me surely there was backups someone could undo this conflagration but no none of my fevered ramblings would come to pass the server was dead killed by my own folly there was not to be done but travel back to my residence and spend the night in the sleepless fits that a man wrought with guilt should suffer and suffer i did never had six hours stretch themselves into an eternity with no horizon before my eyes [Music] without knowing the warm comfort of sleep i returned to the office at a time early enough to know that i'd be the first one in a shamble of a man numbering back to the scene of his whores i should be at the front door personally meeting the face of every employee whose day i had destroyed would i greet them apologetic a meek smile on my face to mask my dread prostate myself on the sidewalk before them the concrete as cracked and trot upon as i felt a small blessing in disguise awaited for me in the break room marie the project manager the system controller was by the coffee machine slowly savoring her morning libation it meant she hadn't yet discovered the fatal deviation i had thrust upon the server if she had she would not be enjoying herself as such without a word we marched into her office she tried to log into the machine from her terminal a vain attempt for sure but i could not blame her for wanting to verify my folly herself marie was silent for a moment each time her nostrils flared or her lips parted for breath are recoiled knowing a vicious but well-deserved rating will burst from her at any moment for it never came instead she opened a drawer that has not been opened in time and memorable and retrieved a key unlike any i had ever seen it was oddly shaped tiny spikes and spokes protruded from it at odd angles even though the key was ancient it was not tarnished it's a key to the server itself marie told me only to be used in the direst of emergencies together we traveled to the server room we passed the steady stream of arriving employees we went through a door i'd never been through and down a flight of stairs i barely knew existed the temperature had noticeably dropped in the dimly lit concrete hallway that ran the length of the building i could almost see my breath escaping from my mouth like a vagrant soul trying to rend its way from this place this leads to the server room she told me which was odd because i thought the servers were housed upstairs in the tech room but no i was mistaken this was the server room specified and equipped by ibm this was the aix server room it was where the erp itself resided separate from the email servers from the web servers and from all the other infrastructure i had physically touched boxes that looked like nothing i had ever laid my eyes upon reams of wiring dipped and swooped to and fro and in and out of places obscured by shadow none of them were the same rj45 ethernet was that a token ring terminator how ancient were these connections and beyond all the bewildering world of technology a single box sat on a desk like a steel deus enclosed with a cage of metal to keep the box safe or perhaps to keep people safe from the box marie inserted the strange key into the receptacle she turned it and a new sound filled the air and it was rising something coming to life if life is how you dare describe it the shambling thing that was merely a hollow shell of what it once was the built-in monitor glowed the server pulled a maintenance shell from behind comprehension from beyond user space and projected it onto the screen marie laid her fingers on the keyboard it was a direct connection to the soul of the entire system will this work i dared ask i hope so she said quietly and her fingertips twitching or else i'll have to call her voice child off she typed a command and the system told her it couldn't be found that that cannot be marie said staring at the incomprehensible and impossible error message that command she types shouldn't be missing it was a standard command known by all repeated by all and the colonel since the earliest recorded epoch maybe even before it was part of the system the system i had sliced into pieces and scattered i spoke about the temporary directory look there for the commands i can't she replied it is not found it can't simply be gone the ls command must exist unless no i couldn't think of it i refused to acknowledge that thought that nod at me to think of what i'd done to think of why i'd done it how i'd done it i couldn't address those modem files directly only indirectly by inference why could it not be done that way again does cp exist i asked she typed so slowly fearfully tap tap thunk silence and then yes a single word but a rush of hope beyond comprehension as deep as we were in the mouth of madness a single solitary word of hope had been uttered and it was louder than any cacophony of cooling fans we can do this i said the commands aren't missing they're just relocated beyond the veil of normal directory structure but i know where they are in limbo and we can pluck them back put them back where they belong try system commands one at a time and if they fail we can restore them one at a time with cp i hope so marie said again and typed the first command copied then the second and a third one by one we identified the commands pulled them from the temporary void and restored them after an hour we had pulled the server back from the brink of death and restored a functional operating system barely functional perhaps i should only describe it as at best stabilized the commands worked but not as expected interactions were off permissions were not correct and that silver hope just like that was extinguished under a burden of realization had restored the command structure of the server but there were still files in the void of the temporary directory an unknown portion of the server was still sequestered away and the maintenance shell simply could not put them back into place properly even if either of us knew how it's over i said defeated but for some reason marie wasn't no it isn't she said a wicked grin on her manic face how could she be pleased had the overwhelming burden of what had fallen upon us broken her at last they can work with this i know they can they i said confused as marie pushed past me who are they she picked up a dusty wired phone and phoned the number pasted on the wall she turned and finally answered me ibm support [Music] she spoke to the phone at first in english but then slowly slipping into tongues i did not comprehend acronyms chains of words that should be familiar but lost their meanings when put in the order she did i could not understand marie but i could read her body language apprehensive and pensive hope i wish i could share any of those feelings but this place was getting to me the blinking lights the dark shadows machines that may or may not be doing their job the central heart and soul of it all limping along the fine line between life and death we barely spoke at all what did we have to talk about what did we dare say out loud in this place soon enough thank any deity who would hear me they arrived men in grey suits decorated with an attack's various a very important person visitor tags the ancient handlers arrived those who brought their tomes and their incantations and rituals and their price it would be steep and non-negotiable they set up around the server briefcase full of keys like marie's but stranger wires and ends like gaping maws of no shape i had ever seen terminals that were like in attack's own but only on the surface and before they began they shoot us out of the server room like a cult that held onto their secrets i do not know what went on in that basement and for the sake of whatever sanity i have left to this day i do not want to know the system was dragged back from the brink piece by piece into a patchwork by the end of the day terminals flared back to some imitation of life i never saw the strange men from ibm leave but by the time i dared go back to the office they were gone the server was up once again accepting terminal connections it reached out to the world and let the world reach into it it was a server once more on the surface the system looked normal but i had seen into the deep even now i could see the patchwork the scars the artifacts of what had risen though this system ostensibly worked eternal and irrevocable evidence of the madness remained i could never be confident that some random glitch was not related to the great awakening of chaos in attack moved on from the incident and brought minitech into the fold and several other companies since management always talks of replacing the erp system and the aix server that hosts it but that project like all corporate projects was always six months away from completion no one delved into the details of this incident even marie took the knowledge of the madness with her when she left in attack shortly thereafter and thus no single person had complete knowledge of what happened nor the means to piece it together no one knew the full extent of what transpired that fateful and horrible day no one but for myself i have gathered together all evidence and documents i could find of the incident the flood of ticket requests from the day work orders from ibm cultists who face down the thing marie's incomplete postmortem the seemingly random spattering of bug reports that trickled in even to this day i put it all on this usb stick with it shall go to this blog of mine this test of my own sanity wherein is pieced together that which i hope may never be pieced together again i have looked upon all that erp has told of horror and even the satisfaction of system administration and the acquisition and adaptation of new technology must ever afterward be poisoned to me but i do not think my tenure at innotech will be long as marie went as so many poor technicians went so i shall go let me pray that if this blog outlast me my web administrators may put caution before audacity and see that it meets no other web server i know too much and still in its cage at the server room the patchwork erp waits dreaming [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Music] you