I'm on holiday next week. Guess what I'll be doing.

Correct. Recompiling all of my sources again. I wish I had a Mac instead.

Are we all friends again?

Stolen:

Just stop it, or I'll have to block your email. I'm sorry about what I said about the Green Spam, and I unreservedly apologise to "Drogon" for my temper.

You are quite correct in your assertion that environment matters. Now can I please go to bed?

FFS.

I don't know which of you cretins has signed me up for all of this Green Party crap. I'm not interested. I've never been a member of a political party, I have no political views, no opinions and certainly no plans. I don't know what The Surge is. I don't care about young people or old people or homeless or anything other than myself.

Pave the world, for all I care. Fuck off, Drogon or whatever your real name is.

Sorry, I really should of posted this earlier, but I'm drunk again.

I managed to get quite a lot of Mortimer's bot to compile and run by commenting parts out and planting links in various places. It's very Usenet-specific, and some of it expects to be run on an NNTP server: do such things even exist nowadays?

Anyways, to precis a long and tbh exhausting session (pasted from another window):

Script started on Fri Oct  3 23:20:55 2014
daisy% gdmc^Gore
[X ^ P: starting gdmcore 6.4]

checking environment... passed.
checking databases... not found.

Database open failed.
daisy% gdmcore blah
unrecognised operation, -h for help

So, help is available. What it doesn't mention is that when it says "checking environment", it's actually adding stuff to your .bash_profile, which doesn't work and logs you out instead.

daisy% gdmcore ESC[K-h
usage: gdmcore -h | [-vnixec] [bot botargs]
               -v = verbose
               -n = dry run
               -i = interactive
               -x = don't open databases
               -e = extended processing (use with care)
               -c = single shot command
               -h = this helpful message

This is gdmcore V6.4, another fine product from XenoPsyche, Inc.

Pretty obvious what I tried next.

daisy% gdmcore -x
[X ^ P: starting gdmcore 6.4]

checking environment... passed.
database checking disabled.
checking authorisation... not authorised!

enter service key: ^C
daisy% exit

Script done on Fri Oct  3 23:21:18 2014
daisy%

I suppose I have no idea what to do with this. Any suggestions welcome.

OK, I admit it, it's like an itch. I've been messing about with Mortimer's bot. I'll post about that later, but although it hasn't done anything interesting yet, it's somehow locked me out of daisy. Have to get in on the console!

So, I've taken a copy. It took ages.

vagabond% du morty.tar
4174618 morty.tar

That's just shy of 4 gigs. Guess what I found?

vagabond% ls /mnt/data/spool
alt             humanities      news            sci             talk
comp            misc            rec             soc

WTF? Some kind of snapshot of Usenet from 2003? LOL.

I couldn't resist it. Shouldn't have bothered.

Script started on Fri Oct  3 12:42:42 2014
vagabond% ./gdmcore
Can't locate /usr/local/news/lib/innshellvars.pl in @INC (@INC contains: /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/mach/5.20 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.20/mach /usr/local/lib/perl5/5.20 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.20 /usr/local/lib/perl5/site_perl/5.20/mach .) at ./gdmcore line 13.
vagabond% exit

Script done on Fri Oct  3 12:42:46 2014

Prolly just take a copy and forget about it.

Well blow me. I haven't heard from Mortimer Hebblethwaite since he left MCC and disappeared back in the noughties. I feel quite nostalgic.

This must be the source for that bot Morty wrote. Naughty Morty.

Script started on Fri Oct  3 11:48:48 2014
vagabond% c ^H^H^[[Kcd /mnt
^[]0;vagabond::/mnt^Gvagabond% ls
bin conf    data    etc     log     run     sbin
vagabond% ls -l
total 14
drwxr-xr-x  2 mortimer  staff   512 Dec 17  2003 bin
drwxr-xr-x  2 mortimer  staff   512 Dec 18  2003 conf
drwxr-xr-x  4 mortimer  staff  2048 Dec  9  2003 data
drwxr-xr-x  2 mortimer  staff   512 Dec 17  2003 etc
drwxr-xr-x  2 mortimer  staff   512 Dec  4  2003 log
drwxr-xr-x  2 mortimer  staff   512 Dec  4  2003 run
drwxr-xr-x  2 mortimer  staff   512 Dec  7  2003 sbin
vagabond% ls bin
BotArchal.pm        BotFlonk.pm     BotPhrase.pm    inews           gdmcore
BotCrime.pm BotFortune.pm   NewsStalker.pm  nhdr            sockpost
BotDaisy.pm BotMarkov.pm    botchan         polybot
vagabond% more bin/gd^Gvagabond% more ^H^H^H^H^H^[[5P^[[Kmore bin/gdm^Gcore
^[[?1h^[=#! /usr/local/bin/perl -w
# This is the bot, bot, and furthermore, bot.
# *** Copyright (C) 1996 Mortimer Hebblethwaite, XenoPsyche Inc., England. ***

# *** WARNING *** WARNING *** WARNING *** WARNING *** WARNING *** WARNING ***
#
# THIS SOFTWARE IS NOT IN THE PUBLIC DOMAIN. IT CONTAINS ALGORITHMS WHICH ARE
# PROTECTED BY LAW THROUGHOUT THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA, GREAT BRITAIN AND
# AUSTRALIA.
#
# *** WARNING *** WARNING *** WARNING *** WARNING *** WARNING *** WARNING ***

require '/usr/local/news/lib/innshellvars.pl';

use strict;
use Sys::Syslog;
use Getopt::Std;

my $DEFAULTEDITOR = "/usr/local/bin/emacs";
my $MYDIR = "/usr/local/news/bothaus";
my $DATADIR = "$MYDIR/data";
my $CONFDIR = "$MYDIR/conf";
my $BINDIR = "$MYDIR/bin";

my $INEWS = "/usr/local/bin/inews";
my $SM = "/usr/local/news/bin/sm";

# command line parameters

ESC[7m--More--(15%)ESC[27mESC[KESC[KESC[?1lESC>You have new mail in /var/mail/ip
vagabond% ESC[Kexit

Script done on Fri Oct  3 11:52:58 2014

I brought the drives. Owen isn't even here today. This place sucks.