From: invalid AT erehwon DOT invalid (Graaagh the Mighty) Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp Subject: Sabotage! Organization: Low Charisma Anonymous Message-ID: <3b59ebfb.298502@news.primus.ca> X-Newsreader: Forte Free Agent 1.11/32.235 Lines: 86 Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2001 21:13:19 GMT NNTP-Posting-Host: 207.176.153.87 X-Complaints-To: news AT primus DOT ca X-Trace: news1.tor.primus.ca 995750021 207.176.153.87 (Sat, 21 Jul 2001 17:13:41 EDT) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 21 Jul 2001 17:13:41 EDT To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com DJ-Gateway: from newsgroup comp.os.msdos.djgpp Reply-To: djgpp AT delorie DOT com This is going to sound a little weird. Earlier today, I came back from some shopping to find that a certain someone who I fervently wish did not have easy access to my box had apparently been messing with it again. It had been sitting at a Win98 desktop with a couple of folder windows and a DOS box open, totally idle save for some bottom-feeders (Prime95 and United Devices), task scheduler, and a wallpaper changer, all of which are known to be stable and none of which interact. Task scheduler was not set to run anything during that time period except for the usual critical update notification, which would be a no-op since the machine was not connected to the net. When I came back, I found it in a radically different state: there were crash dialogs for no fewer than 3 apps -- the wallpaper changer and two components of my antivirus system (McAfee); the former couldn't have crashed without someone having interacted with it, and the latter only wake up (and have the opportunity to crash) when files are downloaded or other actions taken by a user that can potentially introduce viruses into the box. (There was no network connection or automatic downloader running.) Also, my firewall (ZoneAlarm 2.6) had been manually shut down by the pest. No network dial-out had occurred in my absence -- fortunate, given that the pest had (accidentally or otherwise) managed to turn off nearly all of the machine's shields! I restarted some stuff, then modified some source file and compiled something. To my horror, I discovered that my DJGPP installation was non-functional: D:\quickm>gcc -c colorlsm.c -g -O6 -ffast-math -fomit-frame-pointer -fforce-addr -funroll-loops -march=k6 -malign-double Load error: can't switch mode D:\quickm>gcc colorlsm.o -o colorlsm.exe -lalleg Load error: can't switch mode (Yeah, I use a batch file -- for this dinky little thing, using make is like swatting a fly with a tactical nuke.) I have never seen these error messages before, and the last time I checked, nothing of the sort was in the FAQ. Other stuff had been misconfigured or meddled with, also; for one thing, when I tried to open more than two files at once in my programmer's editor I got an out of memory error -- with 256 megabytes of memory! Nothing short of a fork bomb or similar could have consumed most of the heap; the programmer's editor reported that there was insufficient space to allocate about 16K. Suspecting that the pest had in fact played with my compiler and detonated some kind of a fork bomb, I checked the task list using wintop -- nothing unusual. No extra DOS processes for instance. Still, it seemed to have to be something of the sort. If it was, a reboot should correct the problem. It did indeed, or so it appears -- after the reboot, editor and compiler seem to be acting normal again. However, it seems prudent of me to investigate precisely what happened, and whether there might be any permanent effects. Perhaps something is corrupt and should be reinstalled or edited. I figure someone here is probably knowledgeable enough to identify the above, rather uninformative-looking error messages and explain what conditions would cause the compiler and linker to generate them. (They don't *look* like allocation failures.) Perhaps they can even shed some light on exactly what it was that was done to my computer while I was out. Clearly *something* was done, since its state was changed outside of the predictable cyclic behavior it should have maintained indefinitely in my absence. (The only stateful, non-idle things running being Prime95 and United Devices, neither of which were anywhere near finishing their respective tasks and both of which are very well behaved -- they only indirectly call the ill-behaved and somewhat unpredictable networking layer of Windoze when they complete a task or similar.) It wasn't a power failure (I'd have found it sitting at a Linux password prompt, since it default boots to Linux, or still powered off) and it sure as heck didn't wind down like a pocketwatch. Until I can secure some more privacy around here, I need to know just what the heck a certain pest is doing, lest it blow up into serious data loss some day. He probably only tried to play Quake 3 with all the bells and whistles or something on my box that isn't quite up to the requirements the latest games have, but it still seems like a good idea to know for sure, if possible... and with this incident, the mysterious compiler errors look like a big fat clue. -- Bill Gates: "No computer will ever need more than 640K of RAM." -- 1980 "There's nobody getting rich writing software that I know of." -- 1980 "This antitrust thing will blow over." -- 1998 Combine neo, an underscore, and one thousand sixty-one to make my hotmail addy.