8Jan/103
Admin Mourning
by Jeff
Image text: And every day it gets harder to fight the urge to su to the user and freak people out.
This is a play on words with "Ghost in the/a Shell". Ghost in a shell is a concept from cyberpunk and especially the Japanese franchise by the name "Ghost in the Shell" that means when a human's brain and consciousness is inside a mechanical body. Ghost is the person and shell is the mechanical exterior.
In this comic, the play on words is saying if a person dies, they leave a "ghost" of themselves still logged on a server. And of course zShell is a Unix login shell. Which pulls the whole play on words together.
And the image text references "su to the user". Su is the Unix command to switch to another user from the command line.
January 14th, 2010
Also, “The Ghost in ZShell” pronouced the american way : “The Ghost in Zee-Shell” is like a person from France saying “The Ghost in The Shell”.
January 15th, 2010
For the non-geek user this probably needs a bit more explanation. I find this especially scary because it shows exactly what I’m doing for a long time.
First, IRC (Internet Relay Chat) ist one of the oldest chat/instant messaging system, originally based on command-line client which still work perfectly well. One of the more advanced clients ist “irssi”. It still runs in a simply terminal (window). “screen” is a great tool which enables you to leave open a remote terminal session and restore it later by reconnecting to this existing session. And it allows one to have multiple virtual screens residing on my remote server. Normal connections time out when the user goes away, but screen sessions not.
This user, like me, is running a screen session on some kind of server which never terminates. And in one of the virtual screens is running irssi, connected to IRC: As a result, I never leave IRC and so I’m always “online”, even when I’m away or sleeping. When I open my laptop, I connect to the remote screen session and I can see what others have discussed while I was away. Technically, my fellows never know if I’m there or not.
In the strips whe see how an admin displays the list of logged in users (”sam”) and in the last one he examines the process list where he sees the screen session and irssi still running.
Even when sam dies, his screen session is still there and he is kind of “alive”. Well, at least until someone terminates the process or reboots the server which would kill the last presence of sam. Or the admin could connect to sams screen session and say something on IRC which others would treat as a message from sam.
Pretty scary.
Herwig
January 15th, 2010
… and it took me until now to understand why it has to be the user “sam” who leaves a message as a ghost … http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099653/
By the way, this happened to an admin friend of mine. They decided to add a firewall rule to let the connection starve … everything else seemed just wrong, he said.