Some time ago, I decided to build a Linux box and gain some expertise with a real system. I set up Red Hat 7.1, X, the whole works. It got control of the DNS hostname that AT&T had kindly given me as well, so I set up Apache and a mail server, and gave all my friends an account.

Recently, my girlfriend broke up with me.

By then, she'd been using her address @zach.att.com for quite awhile, and all her friends knew it and used it as her primary. My logs said that she was actually responsible for one-fifth of the mail traffic on my server.

I didn't really have the guts to kill the account or change her password, so I contented myself with small revenges. I wrote a daemon which executed wall every 15 seconds:

-- Broadcast message from root (tty1) Nov 16 2002 at 13:51:02 --
Get off my server, you're not wanted here.

-- Broadcast message from root (tty1) Nov 16 2002 at 13:51:17 --
Didn't you hear me? I don't know why you're still here. Leave me the hell alone.

-- Broadcast message from root (tty1) Nov 16 2002 at 13:51:32 --
I slept with your sister.

She kept showing up, though. I recompiled getty so that her account took ten minutes to log in. fortune called her a bitch at every possible opportunity. Her sessions still kept piling up.

A couple days ago, I got desperate. Driven beyond my means; I opened sendmail.

From: angela@zach.att.com
To: <her brand-new rebound boyfriend's address>
Bcc: <her parents>
Subject: I thought you'd like to know

I'm leaving. I hope none of you miss me too much, but I'm not coming back from Devner. I found a job at the airport for the time being, and this is where I'm staying. It's destiny, guys.

Love you all.

She'd really just gone to a journalism seminar in the Rockies for the weekend. Her parents freaked out and drove a third of the way across the country to find her. By some miraculous twist of fate, none of them ever realized that I'd sent the message myself; guess they weren't real hackers, after all. The police wrote it off as a weird prank, and she got paranoid and stopped using my server. I could finally disable my insult robots.

Really, everyone was happy in the end.