It was a very strange system with a few commands with standard names but non-standard behaviors, and a very minimalistic shell. Haha! The owner must never have set this up. That worked but we were prompted:Īh, too bad, we will never guess what the password is… Mh, let's try "123456" just in case… But then, instead of logging us in or telling us that we entered the wrong password, it simply said: Then, we tried to ssh to the box, but no ssh server was listening. So we connected to it, and then saw that it had huge data files containing what seemed like random junk. Most of them were small or not writable, but at least one of them was writable, and it had hundreds of GB of free space. So we wrote a script that tested random IPv4 for FTP servers using nmap and then attempted to connect. When we were undergrad students, a friend and I wondered exactly that same question about FTP servers. I have a fun story about open FTP servers. If you're wondering how many open HTTP servers there are, Netcraft does a pretty good monthly survey. It's kind of like a real-world "shibboleet" - I guess sometimes assholes push mandates for CAPTCHAs and whatnot on a company's technical folk, but they leave FTP open because the assholes don't know about it. Nowadays I occasionally look for FTP servers because they tend to be less of a pain in the ass for downloading stuff than HTTP servers - you can usually get a full list of what they have, and they never interrupt you with CAPTCHAs. So not only have I wondered how many open FTP servers there are, my exploration of the internet pretty much started with a list of them. I bound some function keys on my terminal to different internet commands (FTP, TELNET) and internet sites (like those I mentioned) so I could FTP to wuarchive or TELNET to HPCwire with two keystrokes.Īt some point I got hold of Scott Yanoff's list of interesting Internet services (capitalizing Internet was still justifiable at the time) and learned about the Weather Underground, Archie, HPCWire, and this new thing called the "World Wide Web" - I started telnetting to a server at the University of Kansas where I could use Lynx, and it seemed pretty clear that this was going to be a big deal, because of how enormously much easier it was than downloading text files over FTP. The VAX had a help file installed which was a list of thousands of anonymous FTP servers, most of which requested that you please not use anonymous FTP during business hours to avoid overloading them shortly I was downloading all kinds of things from (which had a LOT of stuff) and, which worried my dad. I got my first internet account on my high school's VAX in 1992 in order to download Dr.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |