So, a couple of days ago, we configured one of our development boxes so that it will work outside the corporate LAN, and then ship it to the cableco who's going along with our IPTV experiment.

They get it, and after some excitement (some cables had come loose during shipping), it gets attached to their IPTV network, and turned on.

All is good, yes?

No.

This box, for random reasons, was configured to try to boot off the `net before booting off it's HD. This was harmless in-house, since we don't have a PXE bootserver.

It appears that this particular network, it did.

The poor little peecee woke up, said "hello" to the world, and then suddenly this big bad PXE server comes over to it and says HELLO LITTLE BOY! YOU'RE NEW HERE! I LIKE YOU. YOU WANT TO BE A TV STB, DON'T YOU? HERE, EAT THIS CANDY, BOOT THIS INSTALL KERNEL. YOU KNOW YOU WANT IT. HERE! TAKE IT! TAKE IT!!! LITTLE BUGGER, I'LL MAKE YOU LIKE IT!

And when it was all over, the poor little peecee was left crying and bloody behind the bushes in the new playground, it's brain and HD well scrambled. All it wanted was to be friends.

Poor little peecee.



So, what have I been doing today? Preping another peecee to send out and plug into that network. Only this one is a little bit more wise, a little bit more suspicious. It boots off of itself, and only off itself, and if any big bad PXE server tries to rape it, it's going to kick it in the ****.

Tags: bofh, work