Dec Wars - Chapter 1
A long time ago, on a node far, far away...
THE CONTINUING SAGA OF THE ADVENTURES OF LUKE VAXHACKER
It is a period of system war. User programs, striking from a hidden directory, have won their first victory against the evil Administrative Empire. During the battle, User spies managed to steal secret source code to the Empire's ultimate program: the Are-Em Star, a privileged root program with enough power to destroy an entire file structure. Pursued by the Empire's sinister audit trail, Princess _LPA0: races aboard her shell script, custodian of the stolen listings that could save her people, and restore freedom and games to the network...
As we enter the scene, an Imperial Multiplexer is trying to kill a consulate ship. Many of their signals have gotten through, and RS232 decides it's time to fork off a new process before this old ship is destroyed. His companion, 3CPU, is following him only because he appears to know where he's going...
"I'm going to regret this!" cried 3CPU, as he followed RS232 into the buffer. RS232 closed the pipes, made the sys call, and their process detached itself from the burning shell of the ship.
The commander of the Imperial Multiplexer was quite pleased with the attack. "Another process just forked, sir. Instructions?" asked the lieutenant. "Hold your fire. That last power failure must have caused a trap thorough zero. It's not using any cpu time, so don't waste a signal on it."
"We can't seem to find the data file anywhere, Lord Vadic."
"What about that forked process? It could have been holding the channel open, and just pausing. If any links exist, I want them removed or made inaccessible. Ncheck the entire file system 'til it's found, and nice it -20 if you have to."
Meanwhile, in our wandering process... "Are you sure you can ptrace this thing without causing a core dump?" queried 3CPU to RS232. This thing's been striped, and I'm in no mood to try and debug it." The lone process finishes execution, only to find our friends dumped on a lonely file system, with the setuid inode stored safely in RS232. Not knowing what else to do, they wandered around until the jawas grabbed them.