Overclocked | Page 4

rack one floor down. He wondered if it was offline too.
"What's the story?"
"Massive flashworm attack. Some jackass with a zero-day exploit has
got every Windows box on the net running Monte Carlo probes on

every IP block, including IPv6. The big Ciscos all run administrative
interfaces over v6, and they all fall over if they get more than ten
simultaneous probes, which means that just about every interchange
has gone down. DNS is screwy, too -- like maybe someone poisoned
the zone transfer last night. Oh, and there's an email and IM component
that sends pretty lifelike messages to everyone in your address book,
barfing up Eliza-dialog that keys off of your logged email and
messages to get you to open a Trojan."
"Jesus."
"Yeah." Van was a type-two sysadmin, over six feet tall, long pony-tail,
bobbing Adam's apple. Over his toast-rack chest, his tee said CHOOSE
YOUR WEAPON and featured a row of polyhedral RPG dice.
Felix was a type-one admin, with an extra seventy or eighty pounds all
around the middle, and a neat but full beard that he wore over his extra
chins. His tee said HELLO CTHULHU and featured a cute, mouthless,
Hello-Kitty-style Cthulhu. They'd known each other for fifteen years,
having met on Usenet, then f2f at Toronto Freenet beer-sessions, a Star
Trek convention or two, and eventually Felix had hired Van to work
under him at Ardent. Van was reliable and methodical. Trained as an
electrical engineer, he kept a procession of spiral notebooks filled with
the details of every step he'd ever taken, with time and date.
"Not even PEBKAC this time," Van said. Problem Exists Between
Keyboard And Chair. Email trojans fell into that category -- if people
were smart enough not to open suspect attachments, email trojans
would be a thing of the past. But worms that ate Cisco routers weren't a
problem with the lusers -- they were the fault of incompetent engineers.
"No, it's Microsoft's fault," Felix said. "Any time I'm at work at 2AM,
it's either PEBKAC or Microsloth."
#
They ended up just unplugging the frigging routers from the Internet.
Not Felix, of course, though he was itching to do it and get them

rebooted after shutting down their IPv6 interfaces. It was done by a
couple bull-goose Bastard Operators From Hell who had to turn two
keys at once to get access to their cage -- like guards in a Minuteman
silo. 95 percent of the long distance traffic in Canada went through this
building. It had *better* security than most Minuteman silos.
Felix and Van got the Ardent boxes back online one at a time. They
were being pounded by worm-probes -- putting the routers back online
just exposed the downstream cages to the attack. Every box on the
Internet was drowning in worms, or creating worm-attacks, or both.
Felix managed to get through to NIST and Bugtraq after about a
hundred timeouts, and download some kernel patches that should
reduce the load the worms put on the machines in his care. It was
10AM, and he was hungry enough to eat the ass out of a dead bear, but
he recompiled his kernels and brought the machines back online. Van's
long fingers flew over the administrative keyboard, his tongue
protruding as he ran load-stats on each one.
"I had two hundred days of uptime on Greedo," Van said. Greedo was
the oldest server in the rack, from the days when they'd named the
boxes after Star Wars characters. Now they were all named after
Smurfs, and they were running out of Smurfs and had started in on
McDonaldland characters, starting with Van's laptop, Mayor
McCheese.
"Greedo will rise again," Felix said. "I've got a 486 downstairs with
over five years of uptime. It's going to break my heart to reboot it."
"What the everlasting shit do you use a 486 for?"
"Nothing. But who shuts down a machine with five years uptime?
That's like euthanizing your grandmother."
"I wanna eat," Van said.
"Tell you what," Felix said. "We'll get your box up, then mine, then I'll
take you to the Lakeview Lunch for breakfast pizzas and you can have
the rest of the day off."

"You're on," Van said. "Man, you're too good to us grunts. You should
keep us in a pit and beat us like all the other bosses. It's all we deserve."
#
"It's your phone," Van said. Felix extracted himself from the guts of the
486, which had refused to power up at all. He had cadged a spare
power-supply from some guys who ran a spam operation and was
trying to get it fitted. He let Van hand him the phone, which had fallen
off his belt while he was twisting to get at the back of the machine.
"Hey,