Playing tricks with Linux
 

This might sound like an odd post, but I was hoping that some of you might share some tricks you have come up with in the past for playing tricks on your friends with Linux. In my office, all of our machines are open and anyone can modify a person's .bashrc. This is the most obvious one for mischief, but can anyone spread any light on other possibilities (there are a couple of guys who think they can't be tricked). So anything ideas?

I read in Linux format that you could use squid to change all the jpg's, gif's etc on a website to display what ever picture you want. Perhaps you could do that. Put each of there facesfor a different image format. Dunno if it would be classed as a trick but id personally find it pretty funny.

Change their runlevel to 0, so it just reboots upon bootup. That drives those that don't know much about *nix nuts.

At my last job, to prevent users from searching job sites, we redirected anyone who went to the search page at www.monster.com to a page that looked like monster's own but said their site was down for maintenance, funny how we actually had employees start to notice when it had been supposedly down for weeks and they actually sent trouble tickets on it cause they said they could get to it from home.. not a smart move, now we knew who was definitely looking for new jobs.

Use to have a perl script that would launch the X windows logo on a persons remote machine, whenever they clicked it, it would just spawn another image. This would drive them nuts as each time they click to close, it just opens a new one filling up their machine. Some never figured out how to kill it off, so they would just reboot. It was really funny when we would add it to pop up upon login.

Great. How abut this easy thing: Add to a newbies .xinitrc a pointer to a script displaying an xmessg with the following text: You are too new to use this OS. Try some easier distro. And then ,when he asks you for help, quickly kill it and show him that only _you_ are experienced enough to use the OS.

you could set that message with xmessage to run at boot up