From philabs!cmcl2!floyd!harpo!npois!jak Fri May 21 13:55:19 1982
Subject: all 7 old decwars articles
Newsgroups: net.sources

Subject: DEC WARS
Have you ever wondered what happened to all those characters eaten by
arpavax?  Well, we found most of them loitering around on our system,
taking up disk space.  So we're putting them back out on the net where
they belong.  Any resemblence to events real or imagined is purely
intentional.




	A long time ago, on a node far, far away (from ucbvax).....


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     X    X  X       X    X          X    X   X  X   X    X  X         X
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     X    X  X       X               X XX X  XXXXXX  XXXXX        X    X
     X    X  X       X    X          XX  XX  X    X  X   X   X    X
     XXXXX   XXXXXX   XXXX           X    X  X    X  X    X   XXXX     X



Luke had grown up on an out of the way terminal cluster whose natives spoke
only BASIC, but even he could recognize an old ASR-33.

"It needs an EIA conversion at least," sniffed 3CPU, who was (as usual)
trying to do several things at once.  Lights flashed in Con Solo's eyes
as he whirled to face the parallel processor.

"I've added a few jumpers.  The Milliamp Falcon can run current loops around
any Imperial TTY fighter.  She's fast enough for you."

"Who's your co-pilot?" asked PDP-1 Kenobie.

"Two Bacco, here, my Bookie."

"Odds aren't good," said the brownish lump beside him, and then fell silent,
or over.  Luke couldn't tell which way was top underneath all those leaves.

Suddenly, RS232 started spacing wildly.  They turned just in time to see
a write cycle coming down the UNIBUS toward them.  "Imperial Bus Signals!"
shouted Con Solo.  "Let's boot this popsicle stand!  Tooie, set clock fast!"

"Ok, Con," said Luke.  "You said this crate was fast enough.  Get us out
of here!"

"Shut up, kid!  Two Bacco,  prepare to make the jump into system space!
I'll try to keep their buffers full."

As the bookie began to compute the vectors into low core, spurious characters
appeared around the Milliamp Falcon.  "They're firing!" shouted Luke. "Can't
you do something?"

"Making the jump to system space takes time, kid.  One missed cycle and you
could come down right in the middle of a pack of stack frames!"

"Three to five we can go now," said the bookie.  Bright chunks of position
independent code flashed by the cockpit as the Milliamp Falcon jumped through
the kernel page tables.  As the crew breathed a sigh of relief, the bookie
started paying off bets.

"Not bad, for an acoustically coupled network," remarked 3CPU.  "Though
there was a little phase jitter as we changed parity."

To be continued...
----------------------
* DEC, PDP, VAX, and UNIBUS are trademarks of Digital Equipment Corporation.


Subject: The SBI Strikes Back
Some months later...

Luke was feeling rather bored.  3CPU could get to be rather irritating
and RS232 didn't really speak Luke's language.  Suddenly, Luke felt
someone's eyes boring through the back of his skull.  He turned slowly
to see...nothing.  A quiet voice came from somewhere in front of him.

"Grasshopper, the carrier is strong within you."  Luke froze, which was
a good thing since his legs were insisting that he run but they weren't
likely to be particular about direction.  Luke guessed that his odds of
getting lost in the dense tree structures were pretty good.  Unfortunately,
the Bookie wasn't available.

"Yes. Very strong, but the modulation is yet weak. His network interface
is totally undeveloped," the voice continued.  A small furry creature
walked out of the woods as Luke stared on.  Luke's stomach had now joined
the rest of his body in loud complaints.  Whatever was peering at him was
certainly small and furry, but Luke was quite sure that it didn't come
from Alpha Centauri.

"Well, well," said the creature as it rolled its eyes at Luke.  "Frobozz,
y'know.  Morning, name's modem.  What's your game?  Adventure?  D&D? Or
are you just one of those Apple-pong types that hang around the store
demonstrations?"  Luke closed his eyes.  Perhaps if he couldn't see it,
it wouldn't notice him.

"H'mm," muttered the creature.  "Must use a different protocol.  @@@H   @@
@($@@@H          }"@G$    @#@@G'(o%  @@@@@%%H(b ?"

"No, no," stammered Luke.  "I don't speak EBCDIC.  I was sent here to
become a UNIX wizard.  Must have the wrong address."

"Right address," said the creature.  "I'm a UNIX wizard.  Device drivers
a specialty.  Or do you prefer playing with virtual memory?"

Luke eyed the creature cautiously.  If this was what happened to system
wizards after years of late night crashes, Luke wasn't sure he wanted
anything to do with it.  He felt a strange affection for the familiar
microcomputers of his home.  And wasn't virtual memory something that
you got from drinking too much Coke?



To be continued... if we're not lynched...


Subject: DEC WARS
The Further Adventures of Luke Vaxhacker			Episode n+1


The story thus far:  Luke, PDP-1 and their 'droids RS232 and 3CPU have made
good their escape from the Imperial Bus Signals with the aid of Con Solo
and the bookie, Two Bacco.  The Milliamp Falcon hurtles onward through
system space.  Meanwhile, on a distant page in user space...

Princess _LPA0: was ushered into the conference room, followed closely by
Dec Vadic.  "Governor Tarchive," she spat, "I should have expected to
find you holding Vadics lead.  I recognized your unique pattern when I was
first brought aboard."  She eyed the 0177545 tatooed on his header coldly.

"Charming to the last," Tarchive declared menacingly.  "Vadic, have you
retrieved any information?"

"Her resistance to the logic probe is considerable," Vadic rasped.
"Perhaps we would get faster results if we increased the supply voltage..."

"You've had your chance, Vadic.  Now I would like the princess to witness
the test that will make this workstation fully operational.  Today we
enable the -r beam option, and we've chosen the princess' $HOME of
/usr/alderaan as the primary target."

"No!  You can't!  /usr/alderaan is a public account, with no restricted
permissions.  We have no backup tapes!  You can't..."

"Then name the rebel inode!" Tarchive snapped.

A voice announced over a hidden speaker that they had arrived in /usr.

"1248," she whispered, "They're on /dev/rm3.  Inode 1248."  She turned away.

Tarchive sighed with satisfaction.  "There, you see, Lord Vadic?  She can
be reasonable.  Proceed with the operation."

It took several clock ticks for the words to penetrate.  "What!" _LPA0:
gasped.

"/dev/rm3 is not a mounted filesystem," Tarchive explained.  "We require a
more visible subject to demonstrate the power of the RM STAR workstation.  We
will mount an attack on /mnt/dantooine as soon as possible."

As the princess watched, Tarchive reached over and typed "ls" on a nearby
terminal.  There was a brief pause, there being only one processor on board,
and the viewscreen showed, ".: not found."  The princess suddenly double-
spaced and went off-line.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Subject: DEC WARZ

Due to momentary lapse of conciousness, the previous episode in the
continuing saga came out in net.general.  We'll make it up to you...
maybe later.
------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Even Further Adventures of Luke Vaxhacker                Episode n+2

The Milliamp Falcon hurtles on through system space...

Con Solo finished checking the various control and status registers, finally
convinced himself that they had lost the Bus Signals as they passed the
terminator.  As he returned from the I/O page, he smelled smoke.
Solo wasn't concerned--the Bookie always got a little hot under the collar
when he was losing at chess.  In fact, RS232 had just executed a particularly
clever MOV that had blocked the Bookie's data paths.  The Bookie, who had
been setting the odds on the game, was caught holding all the cards.  A
little strange for a chess game...

Across the room, Luke was too busy practicing bit-slice technique to notice
the commotion.

"On a word boundary, Luke," said PDP-1. "Don't just hack at it.  Remember,
the Bytesaber is the weapon of the Red-eye Night.  It is used to trim offensive
lines of code.  Excess handwaving won't get you anywhere.  Listen for the
Carrier."

Luke turned back to the drone, which was humming quietly in the air next to
him.  This time Luke's actions complemented the drone's attacks perfectly.

Con Solo, being an unimaginative hacker, was not impressed.  "Forget this
bit-slicing stuff.  Give me a good ROM blaster any day."

"~~j~~hhji~~," said Kenobie, with no clear inflection.  He fell silent for a
few seconds, and reasserted his control.

"What happened?" asked Luke.

"Strange," said PDP-1.  "I felt a momentary glitch in the Carrier.  It's
equalized now."

"We're coming up on user space," called Solo from the CSR.  As they 
cruised safely through stack frames, the emerged in the new context only
to be bombarded by freeblocks.

"What the..." gasped Solo.  The screen showed clearly:
		/usr/alderaan: not found
"It's the right inode, but it's been cleared!  Twoie, where's the nearest
file?"

"3 to 5 there's one..." the Bookie started to say, but was interrupted by
a bright flash off to the left.

"Imperial TTY fighters!" shouted Solo.  "A whole DZ of them!  Where are they
coming from?"

"Can't be far from the host system," said Kenobie.  "They all have direct EIA
connections."

As Solo began to give chase, the ship lurched suddenly.  Luke noticed the
link count was at 3 and climbing rapidly.

"This is no regular file," murmured Kenobie.  "Look at the ODS directory
structure ahead!  They seem to have us in a tractor beam."

"There's no way we'll unlink in time," said Solo.  "We're going in."
---------------------------------------------------------------------------


Subject: The previous adventures of Luke Vaxhacker

THE CONTINUING SAGA OF THE ADVENTURES OF LUKE VAXHACKER

You've seen episode n & n+1.  Were you wondering what happened to the
previous episodes?  Well, wonder no more, Episode n-1 has been discovered.
(oh, you lucky people...)


-----------------------------------------------------------------------
The Adventures of Luke Vaxhacker			Episode n-1

	As we enter the scene, an Imperial Multiplexer is trying to
kill a consulate ship.  Many of their signals have gotten through, and
RS232 decides it's time to fork off a new process before this old
ship is destroyed.  His companion, 3CPU, is following him only
because he appears to know where he's going...

	"I'm going to regret this!" cried 3CPU, as he followed RS232
into the buffer.  RS232 closed the pipes, made the sys call, and their
process detached itself from the burning shell of the ship.

	The commander of the Imperial Multiplexer was quite pleased
with the attack. "Another process just forked, sir. Instructions?"
asked the lieutenant.  "Hold your fire.  That last power failure
must have caused a trap thorough zero.  It's not using any cpu time, so
don't waste a signal on it."

	"We can't seem to find the data file anywhere, Lord Vadic."
"What about that forked process?  It could have been holding the
channel open, and just pausing.  If any links exist, I want them
removed or made inaccessable.  Ncheck the entire file system
'til it's found, and nice it -20 if you have to."

	Meanwhile, in our wandering process... "Are you sure you
can ptrace this thing without causing a core dump?" queried 3CPU
to RS232.  This thing's been striped, and I'm in no mood to try
and debug it."  The lone process finishes execution, only to find
our friends dumped on a lonely file system, with the setuid inode stored
safely in RS232.  Not knowing what else to do, they wandered around
until the jawas grabbed them.

	Enter our hero, Luke Vaxhacker, who is out to get some
replacement parts for his uncle. The jawas wanted to sell him 3CPU,
but 3CPU didn't know how to talk directly to an 11/40 with RSTS, so
Luke would still needed some sort of interface for 3CPU to connect to.
"How about this little RS232 unit ?" asked 3CPU. "I've delt with him
many times before, and he does an excellent job at keeping his bits
straight."  Luke was pressed for time, so he took 3CPU's advice, and
the three left before they could get swapped out.

	However, RS232 is not the type to stay put once you remove
the retaining screws.  He promptly scurried off into the the deserted
disk space.  "Great!" cried Luke, "Now I've got this little tin box
with the only link to that file off floating in the free disk space.
Well, 3CPU, we better go find him before he gets allocated by someone
else."  The two set off, and finaly traced RS232 to the home of
PDP-1 Kenobi, who was busily trying to run an icheck on the little
RS unit.  "Is this thing yours?  His indirect address are all goofed
up, and the size is gargatious.  Leave things like this on the loose,
and you'll wind up with dups everywhere.  However, I think I've got
him fixed up.  It seems that he's has a link to a data file on the
Are-Em Star.  This could help the rebel cause." "I don't care about
that," said Luke.  "I'm just trying to optimize my uncles schedualer."

	"Oh, forget about that.  Dec Vadic, who is responsible for
your fathers death, has probably already destroyed his farm in search
of this little RS232.  It's time for you to leave this place, join
the rebel cause, and become a UNIX wizard! I know a guy by the name
of Con Solo, who'll fly us to the rebel base at a price."

----------------



Subject: DEC WARS

Ok, you asked for it.  These things are getting harder and harder to crank
out.  If anyone wants to embellish or put out another episode, feel free.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Further and Further Adventures of Luke Vaxhacker          Episode n+3

When we last left Luke, the Milliamp Falcon was being pulled down to the
open collector of the Imperial Arem Star Workstation.  Dec Vadic surveys
the relic as Imperial Flunkies search for passengers...

"LS scan shows no one aboard, sir," was the report.  Vadic was unconvinced.

"Send a fully equipped Ncheck squad on board," he said.  "I want every
inode checked out."  He turned around (secondary channel) and stalked off.

On board the Milliamp Falcon, .Luke was puzzled.  "They just walked in,
looked around and walked off," he said.  "Why didn't they see us?"

.Con smiled.  "An old munchkin trick," he explained.  "See that period in
front of your name?"

.Luke spun around, just in time to see the decimal point.  "Where'd that
come from?" he asked.

"Spare decimal points lying around from the last time I fixed the floating
point accelerator," said .Con.  "Handy for smuggling blocks accross file
system boundaries, but I never thought I'd have to use them on myself.
They aren't going to be fooled for long, though.  We'd better figure a way
outa here."

-----------------------------------------
At this point (.) the dialogue tends to wedge.  Being the editor and in
total control of the situation, I think it would be best if we sort of
gronk the next few paragraphs.  For those who care, our heroes find
themselves in a terminal room of the Workstation, having thrashed several
Flunkies to get there.  For the rest of you, just keep banging the
rocks together, guys. --Ed.
-----------------------------------------

"Hold on," said Con.  "It says we have `new mail.'  Is that an error?"

"%SYS-W-NORMAL, Normal, successful completion," said PDP-1.  "Doesn't
look like it.  I've found the inode for the Milliamp Falcon.  It's locked
in kernel data space.  I'll have to slip in and patch the reference count,
alone."  He disappeared through a nearby entry point.

Meanwhile, RS232 found a serial port and logged in.  His bell started
ringing loudly.  "He keeps saying, `She's on line, she's on line'," said
3CPU.  "I believe he means Princess LPA0:.  She's being held on one of
the privileged levels."

-----------------------------------------
Once again, things get sticky, and the dialogue suffers the most damage.
After much handwaving and general flaming, they agree to rescue her.
They headed for the detention level, posing as Flunkies (which is hard
for most hackers) claiming that they had trapped the Bookie executing
an illegal racket.  They reached the block where the Princess was locked
up and found only two guards in the header. --Ed.
-----------------------------------------

"Good day, eh?" said the first guard.

"How's it goin', eh?" said the other.  "Like, what's that, eh?"

"Process transfer from block 1138, dev 10/9," said Con.

"Take off, it is not," said the first guard.  "Nobody told US about it, and
we're not morons, eh?"

At this point (.), the Bookie started raving wildly, Con shouted "Look out,
he's loose!" and they all started blasting ROMs left and right.  The guards
started to catch on and were about to issue a general wakeup when the ROM
blasters were turned on them.

"Quickly, now," said Con.  "What buffer is she in?  It's not going to take
long for these..."

The intercom receiver interrupted him, so he took out its firmware with a
short blast.

"guys to figure out something is goin' on," he continued.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
To be continued...      (Aw, leave me hangin', eh?)

Subject: DEC WARS


We're not proud... or tired.  So here are
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Furthest Yet Adventures of Luke Vaxhacker, Third Eye         episode n+4

Ok, like, remember we left our heroes in the detention priority level?  Well,
they're still there...


Luke quickly located the interface card and followed the cables to a sound-
proof enclosure.  He lifted the lid and peered at the mechanism inside.

"Aren't you a little slow for ECL?" printed princess LPA0:.

"Wha?  Oh, the Docksiders," stammered Luke.  He took off his shoes (for
industry) and explained, "I've come relocate you.  I'm Luke Vaxhacker."

Suddenly, forms started bursting around them.  "They've blocked the queue!"
shouted Solo.  "There's only one return from this stack!"

"OVER HERE!" printed LPA0: with overstrikes.  "THROUGH THIS LOOPHOLE!"
Luke and the princess disappeared into a nearby feature.

"Gritch, gritch," mumbled Two Bacco, obviously reluctant to trust
an Administrative oversight.

"I don't care how crufty it is!" shouted Con, pushing the Bookie toward
the crock.  "DPB yourself in there now!"

With one last blast that reprogrammed two flunkies, Con joined them.
The "feature" landed them right in the middle of the garbage collection
data.  Pieces of code that hadn't been used in weeks floated past in
a pool of decaying bits.

"Bletch!" was Con's first comment.  "Bletch, bletch," was his second.
The Bookie looked as if he'd just paid a long shot, and the odds in this
situation weren't much better.

Luke was polling the garbage when he stumbled upon a book with the words
"Don't Panic" inscribed in large, friendly letters on the cover.  "This
can't possibly help us now," he said as he tossed the book away.

The Bookie was about to lay odds on it when Luke suddenly disappeared.
He popped up accross the pool, shouting, "This is no feature! It's a bug!"
and promptly vanished again.

Con and the princess were about to panic() when Luke reappeared.  "What
happened?" they asked in parallel.

"I don't know," gasped Luke.  "The bug just dissolved automagically.
Maybe it hit a breakpoint..."

"I don't think so," said Con.  "Look how the pool is shrinking.  I've
got a bad feeling about this..."

The princess was the first to realize what was going on.  "They've implemented
a new compaction algorithm!" she exclaimed.

Luke remembered the pipe he had open to 3CPU.  "Shut down garbage collection
below recursion level 5!" he shouted.

Back in the control room, RS232 searched the process table for the lisp
interpreter.  "Hurry," sent 3CPU.  "Hurry, hurry," added his other two
processors.  RS232 found the interpreter, interrupted it, and altered
the stack frame they'd fallen into to allow a normal return.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Join us next time when we hear the bowl of petunias say, "Oh, no, not again."

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