Ouch

He has fortune setup to display a 'fortune' when he logs in. Apparently one of the fortunes is a fake kernel panic message. So he logged in and saw this message thinking it was a real kernel panic before he realized it was just the output of fortune.

thaumaturgy2• 16 years ago

"fortune" is a Unix/BSD/Linux command that prints a random quote to your screen (as in "fortune cookie"). Some Unix-like operating systems have fortune set up to run once automatically every time you log in to your account.

Someone with a great sense of humor set one of the random quotes to mimic a very serious operating system error message.

This poor guy finished upgrading his operating system, logged in, and got that error message as his fortune.

andreyf• 16 years ago

It's also a nice touch that the very serious error message is reported as (ignored), which would be impossible if such an error had really occurred.

absconditus• 16 years ago

In an effort to make HN more like reddit jokes are being upvoted to the top position.

thaumaturgy2• 16 years ago

If it makes you feel any better, I never could have guessed this would get so many votes. I've just had a hellacious week so far, came across this in my email, and thought a couple of other folks might enjoy it too.

sh1mmer• 16 years ago

but on HN you actually have to get *nix to get the joke.

omgsean• 16 years ago

In an effort to make HN more like reddit, its users are complaining about the old news aggregation site they used to go to before they found this one.

nkohari• 16 years ago

That's just EVIL. And hilarious.

JeremyChase• 16 years ago

All of my systems use fortune, but it is displayed using different picture files; just another way to keep things interesting. :)

To see what I mean: http://pastebin.org/86456

pierrefar• 16 years ago

There are some things that we shouldn't joke about.</scarred long-time windows user>

s3graham• 16 years ago

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897558.asp... :)

IgorPartola2• 16 years ago

This is fantastic! I haven't seen a BSOD in years (no Vista for me), but what's funny is that it's actually microsoft that's distributing it.

Along the same lines: you take a screenshot of your desktop environment with the terminal open in the middle of the screen. Then use that as your bootsplash image. When friends and enemies ask how you did that you just tell them "I reversed the boot process: first I load KDE, then the kernel. It's a lot faster this way."

ams6110• 16 years ago

I used to have that as my screensaver. It's been around for quite a while; I think there were several different implementations.

It really fooled a lot of folks at the office who would approach me in the morning with serious expressions and say something like "something happened to your machine overnight... it keeps rebooting and blue-screening.

sjs• 16 years ago

As a teenager I learned to program in Win 98 days. I wrote a program that faked the "this program has performed an illegal operation" dialog every few fours and put it on my dad's computer. His programs never crashed but he thought there was something very wrong with his computer. Drove him nuts for a few days. :)

IgorPartola2• 16 years ago

I also like that nethack will tell you "core dumped" if you eat an apple or a pear.

amalcon• 16 years ago

That one gets me every time. And they say Eternal Darkness was the first game to mess with the player.

ed• 16 years ago

For those not on *nix: http://linux.die.net/man/6/fortune

jrockway• 16 years ago

Some day, fortune really is going segfault, and nobody will look into it because they think "Segmentation fault (core dumped)" is one of the clever fortunes.

A fortune in and of itself.

huhtenberg• 16 years ago

I used to have a boot-up message on my cell phone that said "This phone is stolen". And even though it was me who set it, it still got me every time I saw it.

scommab• 16 years ago

I still think this is funniest 'fortune' based story: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=79993

This also doubles as one of my favorite (publicly tracked) bugs

bradfordw• 16 years ago

This may be the funniest thing I've read on HN. Will take a lot to top this one.

sown• 16 years ago

This reminds me of one time in one of our school's labs we somehow rebooted all of the SUN machines and some weird things happened and the log-in screen's wallpaper picture was of a young lady on a beach in a bikini. My first thought, as well as the other sysprogs was that we had been hacked and we ran around for a good hour trying to get to the bottom of things.

The machines ship like that as it turns out as a default wallpaper.

Splines• 16 years ago

Was it this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

jcroberts• 16 years ago

Hello HN! Yep, I'm the person who posted that message to the misc@openbsd list. I've been a very avid silent reader (non-member) of HN over the last year or so... until today. Wow. I made the front page of HN. Hopefully next time it will be for my technical acumen rather than my vivid sense of humor.

drallison• 16 years ago

% file deletion complete.

Ouch

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