Night of the Living NetWare
Posted by Matthew on Monday May 26, 2003 @06:54PM
from the arcane-art-of-ancient-networking dept.
Matthew writes: The University of Utah has reported several recent network attacks originating from undead NetWare servers—servers no longer supported or even remembered but which have been reanimated and remain connected to the network.
One server had recently been found connected to the network by a vampire tap on a long and lonely stretch of thicknet. Most had been powered down ages ago, but mysteriously booted after power was restored from a blackout three weeks ago.
Although Utah has long ago completed a migration to the TCP/IP protocol, these medieval servers speak only the now largely forgotten IPX protocol. This mysterious ancient protocol, akin to the ancient XNS protocol spoken at Xerox many generations ago, still has the power to flood pipes and call forth broadcast storms.
Campus administrators have been advised to watch packet filters closely for spurious IPX packets and to report any unusual activity to forensic network security.