Back in the good-ole days of Windows NT (circa 1998) I was a member of IT support at a large multi-national corporation.\u00a0 The campus I worked for was about five thousand people large.<\/p>\n
Background: Windows 98\/98\/NT 4.0 had a neat little utility to send pop-up messages to specific machines.\u00a0 It was a front end to the So, one slow day a bunch of us were shooting the shit and getting a little rowdy.\u00a0 I think there were some flying objects and maybe a nerf gun involved.\u00a0 One of the upper-level techs, who shall remain unnamed, fired off a message to someone else: “John, look out behind you”.<\/p>\n Only, he didn’t get the machine name right.\u00a0 He broadcast it to the entire campus.\u00a0 5000+ machines.<\/p>\n A lesser-known feature of the Hoo boy, that was some trouble, and being a political organization it nearly took the form of someone’s-getting-fired-type trouble.\u00a0 It took the ‘lizard king’ email storm to finally let it die down completely.\u00a0 I’ll save that story for another day, when I dig the entire email chain out of archives and obfuscate some details.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Back in the good-ole days of Windows NT (circa 1998) I was a member of IT support at a large multi-national corporation.\u00a0 The campus I worked for was about five thousand people large. Background: Windows 98\/98\/NT 4.0 had a neat little utility to send pop-up messages to specific machines.\u00a0 It was a front end to … Continue reading “The Troublesome Broadcast Message”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crdt_document":"","wprm-recipe-roundup-name":"","wprm-recipe-roundup-description":"","advanced_seo_description":"","jetpack_seo_html_title":"","jetpack_seo_noindex":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[142],"tags":[120,64,119],"class_list":["post-794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dad-stories","tag-get-off-my-lawn","tag-tales-from-tech-support","tag-windows"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4o3FW-cO","jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/794","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=794"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/794\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":810,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/794\/revisions\/810"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.jonesling.us\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}net send<\/code> built-in command, and messages would appear almost instantaneously on the recipient’s machine in nice little window.\u00a0 (Similar functionality still exists in more recent versions of Windows, but the messenger service no longer starts by default.)<\/p>\nnet send<\/code> command, and therefore of the messenger utility, was the ability to message an entire workgroup or domain.\u00a0 To do so, you only need to specify the workgroup or domain name in the recipient box.\u00a0 And that’s what he did – he intended John’s machine name but the domain was the default in the box — and he forgot to change it.<\/p>\n