Wen the Eternally Surprised, Pirate in Training

[unixronin]

Wen the Eternally Surprised's random banging on keyboards is really getting to be a serious problem.  She managed to do something this time, with my screen locked, that screwed up my keyboard so completely the only thing I could do was ssh in as root from another machine and kill X.  She's also got some trick she does (we don't yet know what, we haven't observed her to do it) which unlocks cymrullewes's locked WindowMaker workspace on llioness.  Whatever it is, it only works on llioness, so I personally suspect it's a hitherto-unknown Windowmaker hole.

We have a Power Mac with a G3 card in it that she can't manage to do very much to because, well, there's really not that much you can do to the system on a Mac through the keyboard, except power the machine on and off.  She doesn't want to play with the Mac though. She wants to play with Mom and Dad's computers.

I may have to start laying my chair down on its side whenever I go away from my desk.  If I push it under or away from the desk, she's strong enough to roll it back to where she wants it, and if I turn it around facing away from the desk, she climbs up on the back of the chair and plunders everything she can reach from there.  But she's not strong enough to pick the chair up.

(Yet.)

Comments

[felinecanine.livejournal.com]

How about connecting the keyboard through a KVM switch or some other
hardware device that you can use to disable the keyboard?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

That would most likely work, if we had the budget for a KVM.

Re:

[felinecanine.livejournal.com]

Well, I was thinking after you get that job! (good luck!)

[caged-admin.livejournal.com]

Just so I'm clear on this point: is she managing to repeatedly pull the same tricks on your and Cymru's machines? Or were those flukes?

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Whatever she did that hosed my keyboard mapping was a one-off job. Whatever she does to break into Cymru's locked workspace is repeatable; we just don't know what it is.
I'm guessing it's a case of "Well, gee, we never thought of the possibility that someone might hit THOSE three keys at once." Or it might be that Wmaker has some "kill this window" key combination which xlockmore somehow fails to trap, or which Wmaker grabs before it gets to xlockmore. I personally detest and despise Windowmaker, and don't know enough about it to know if any such key chord exists.

Re:

[caged-admin.livejournal.com]

My guess was more along the lines of "input buffer full, terminating." No core files or .Xsession-errors[1] entries, I take it?


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[1] Or whatever it's called.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Nothing suspicious-looking, no. I'm going to keep an eye on that though.