I wanna see garbled text!
 

Just a curiousity...

After a long session of sitting in front of my linux box configuring i don't know what, I was putting away my keyboard and mouse. My second machine doesn't have a desk so I store the K+M on a shelf in close reach.

Anyways, I must have pressed something because when I looked at my monitor again, expecting to see the usual
login screen, I saw nothing but garbled text.

It looked like shorewall was blurting stuff to the screen. I went over to my other machine and tested my webpages, ftp site, ... and they all worked. And as I accessed those things, more blurts on the first machines came onto the screen telling me exactly who was accessing the machine... me.

I pressed ctrl+alt+Fn and all ttys worked, but now I want to see that screen again.

Is it something I pressed? How can I make my monitor a real live feed from my shorewall logs?

Thanks in advance,
ian

i'm not sure how you might have accidentally triggered this, but you can actually cat output strings into other screens because linux sees screens as files. like my friends and i sometimes all log into one box and mess with eachother with commands like "cat > /dev/pts/0" and then whatever you type (as root) goes into that terminal screen. something like that must have happened, but i'm not sure how. side note: never cat your entire root partition's block device into your soundcard.

Well... little did I know that if I waited long enough it would do it again. I might just be a default setting to print some common message to the screen.

For example, no one will be logged on and it will blurt something like
For all I know someone could be port scanning me. Oh how it sucks to be ignorant! :confused:

Thanks,