ugh.book

Not File System Specific? (Not Quite) 291

The Sun kernel has a user-patchable cosmology. It contains a poly-

theism bit called “nobody.” When network file requests come in

from root (i.e., God), it maps them to be requests from the value of

the kernel variable “nobody” which as distributed is set to -1 which

by convention corresponds to no user whatsoever, rather than to 0,

the binary representation of God (*). The default corresponds to a

basically Greek pantheon in which there are many Gods and they’re

all trying to screw each other (both literally and figuratively in the

Greek case). However, by using adb to set the kernel variable

“nobody” to 0 in the divine boot image, you can move to a Ba’hai

cosmology in which all Gods are really manifestations of the One

Root God, Zero, thus inventing monotheism.

Thus when the manifestation of the divine spirit, binmail, attempts to

create a mailbox on a remote server on a monotheistic Unix, it will be

able to invoke the divine change-owner command so as to make it

profane enough for you to touch it without spontaneously combust-

ing and having your eternal soul damned to hell. On a polytheistic

Unix, the divine binmail isn’t divine so your mail file gets created by

“nobody” and when binmail invokes the divine change-owner com-

mand, it is returned an error code which it forgets to check, knowing

that it is, in fact, infallible.

So, patch the kernel on the file server or run sendmail on the server.

-ian

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(*) That God has a binary representation is just another clear indica-

tion that Unix is extremely cabalistic and was probably written by

disciples of Aleister Crowley.

Not File System Specific? (Not Quite)

The NFS designers thought that they were designing a networked file sys-
tem that could work with computers running operating systems other than
Unix, and work with file systems other than the Unix file system. Unfortu-
nately, they didn’t try to verify this belief before they shipped their initial
implementation, thus establishing the protocol as an unchangeable stan-
dard. Today we are stuck with it. Although it is true that NFS servers and
clients have been written for microcomputers like DOS PCs and Macin-
toshes, it’s also true that none of them work well.