?

So it seems I’m catching a cold. Seems like I started feeling like this on saturday. So anyway, arrived at work to an email from the boss to have a meeting at 1:30 today for 2 hours… So i had been working on the binary code sets and cursors, and started working it out. Got to a point where I KNEW it was nearly there, but something was missing.

So had the meeting and had the boss guide me in the right direction. He was looking at my filemaker export and i had ^K and ^] within the tab-delimited file. So removing the Ctrl-K was simple enough, but hitting ^] in vi would load up telnet. After a few more commands, he seemed to have just typed in ? and hit enter. So the screen started scrolling really fast with random lines of code followed by something like “function not found”. So no idea whats going on. Tried to kill what was running, but it wouldn’t stop for nearly a minute. So then we thought nothing of it and continued for another minute or so, until we got a message mention something about process not available.

From this point we were not able to login. So we checked the processes and we had 10000 processes running. Tried killing the ones which were created by my boss… being nearly all of them, but they just kept growing. 10 minutes later it hit 23000 processes and nothing we did would stop it. Removing the user of the process, using the kill and pkill command did nothing. Ended up restarting our server. Getting the server back up 15 minutes later, we looked at what we did. Hitting ? in telnet meant that it was running the wildcard ? and there were 3 files in the directory, one of which was an executable with more question marks inside the executable and so was running an infinite loop. Even though all telnet sessions were closed, the file continued to run, which is very strange.

So that took up my whole 2 hour meeting. After that, i figured out how cursors and binary sets work, and finished what I had been doing. So tomorrow I shall see whats next on the list.

Written by Milton Lai