I did a similar thing at a place I worked at. In order to go over the heads of insane management and actually get work done, rather than just have sugar cubes counted at me all day, I created an administrator account with the username of .
Not blank. The character " ".
What, you can’t see it? It’s a non-breaking space. You can type one (on a Windows machine) by holding Alt and pressing 0160 on your number pad.
A shocking amount of “enterprise” software is not equipped to handle a non-breaking space, and will not detect it as a naughty character nor treat it as whitespace – which is probably what should happen. So what you get is an invisible user, which is also helpfully sorted to the bottom of lists where no one will notice it, because its numerical index in character space is well below all the typical letters and numbers that’ll be used for user account names. Does your software require a user name of greater-than-one character length? No problem, just type in a whole bunch of them.
Non breaking spaces can also mess with the formatting of systems with user-facing text input that’ll regurgitate it later. Like, oh, forums. Or comment threads. Like this one. Even those that are “smart” and attempt to collapse repeated whitespaces into a single line break.
I was burned afoul by a former admin who, instead of diagnosing why a mail service was failing, labeled a script as a /etc/cron.d file entry as “…” (three dots) which, unless you were careful, you’d never notice in an "ls " listing casually. The cron job ran a script with a similar name which he ran once every 5 minutes. It would launch the mail service, but simultaneous services were not allowed to run on the same box, so if it was running, nothing would happen, although this later explained hundreds of “[program] service is already running” errors in our logs. It was every 5 minutes because our solarwinds check would only notice if the service had been down for 5 minutes. The reason why the service was crashing was later fixed in a patch, but nobody knew about this little “helper” script for years.
Until one day, we had a service failover from primary to backup. Normally, we had two mail servers servers behind a load balancer. It would serve only the IP that was reporting as up. Before, we manually disabled the other network port, but this time, that step was forgotten, so BOTH IPs were listening. We shut down the primary mail service, but after 5 minutes, it came back up. The mail software would sync all the mail from one server to the other (like primary to backup, or reversed, but one way only). With both up, the load balancer just sent traffic to a random one.
So now, both IPs received and sent mail, along with web interface users could use. But now, with mail going to both, it created mass confusion, and the mailbox sync was copying from backup to primary. Mail would appear and disappear randomly, and if it disappeared, it was because backup was syncing to primary. It was slow, and the first people to notice were the scant IMAP customers over the next several days. Those customers were always complaining because they had old and cranky systems, and our weekend customer service just told them to wait until Monday. But then more and more POP3 customers started to notice, and after 5 days had passed, we figured out what had happened. And we only did Netbackups every week, so now thousands of legitimate emails were lost for good over 3000 customers. A lot of them were lawyers.
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I did a similar thing at a place I worked at. In order to go over the heads of insane management and actually get work done, rather than just have sugar cubes counted at me all day, I created an administrator account with the username of .
Not blank. The character " ".
What, you can’t see it? It’s a non-breaking space. You can type one (on a Windows machine) by holding Alt and pressing 0160 on your number pad.
A shocking amount of “enterprise” software is not equipped to handle a non-breaking space, and will not detect it as a naughty character nor treat it as whitespace – which is probably what should happen. So what you get is an invisible user, which is also helpfully sorted to the bottom of lists where no one will notice it, because its numerical index in character space is well below all the typical letters and numbers that’ll be used for user account names. Does your software require a user name of greater-than-one character length? No problem, just type in a whole bunch of them.
Non breaking spaces can also mess with the formatting of systems with user-facing text input that’ll regurgitate it later. Like, oh, forums. Or comment threads. Like this one. Even those that are “smart” and attempt to collapse repeated whitespaces into a single line break.
For instance.
Yeah, that sort of thing.
Nice try, HTML hacker.
? I’m using Mobile
I just copied the markdown and stuck it in a code block to make it visible.
I was joking lol
Where did you make the admin account if you don’t mind me asking. You saying you made a local admin account or maybe an admin account in AD?
I was burned afoul by a former admin who, instead of diagnosing why a mail service was failing, labeled a script as a /etc/cron.d file entry as “…” (three dots) which, unless you were careful, you’d never notice in an "ls " listing casually. The cron job ran a script with a similar name which he ran once every 5 minutes. It would launch the mail service, but simultaneous services were not allowed to run on the same box, so if it was running, nothing would happen, although this later explained hundreds of “[program] service is already running” errors in our logs. It was every 5 minutes because our solarwinds check would only notice if the service had been down for 5 minutes. The reason why the service was crashing was later fixed in a patch, but nobody knew about this little “helper” script for years.
Until one day, we had a service failover from primary to backup. Normally, we had two mail servers servers behind a load balancer. It would serve only the IP that was reporting as up. Before, we manually disabled the other network port, but this time, that step was forgotten, so BOTH IPs were listening. We shut down the primary mail service, but after 5 minutes, it came back up. The mail software would sync all the mail from one server to the other (like primary to backup, or reversed, but one way only). With both up, the load balancer just sent traffic to a random one.
So now, both IPs received and sent mail, along with web interface users could use. But now, with mail going to both, it created mass confusion, and the mailbox sync was copying from backup to primary. Mail would appear and disappear randomly, and if it disappeared, it was because backup was syncing to primary. It was slow, and the first people to notice were the scant IMAP customers over the next several days. Those customers were always complaining because they had old and cranky systems, and our weekend customer service just told them to wait until Monday. But then more and more POP3 customers started to notice, and after 5 days had passed, we figured out what had happened. And we only did Netbackups every week, so now thousands of legitimate emails were lost for good over 3000 customers. A lot of them were lawyers.
Oof.
That’s… not how load balancing is supposed to be done…
Connect for Lemmy renders these as
So it’s at least acknowledging that there’s something there.
Its rendering as a spacw for me on eternity lol. U can also put it in the middle of words to make word count heigher than it should be lol.
It is a space, so it’s correct that it shows up. Non-breaking means that something like line wrap won’t happen.
Putting it in the middle of a word will show up. That trick must’ve been a different character.
Ohh though u where talking about zero width spaces they are also fun.
I only know about it because it was a popular way to make an invisible folder no the desktop, teens loved it for stuff.