Pilot fish arrives at work one morning to find a severity-2 trouble ticket on his plate — and it’s a weird one.

“The ticket stated that a Linux box in the DMZ was having a performance issue,” fish says. “The user couldn’t log in, and it was a production server, according to the user, who is in director-level management.

“That’s strange, I thought — I don’t recall that this box made it through to the go-live stage. The monitoring wasn’t even activated yet, which is why we didn’t get any alerts.”

Fish’s first step, as usual: Log into the server with the root login. His attempt fails.

He tries again. It still fails. Fortunately, the network uses Kickstart for installing Linux remotely, so fish is able to use the Kickstart server to get access to the locked-out machine indirectly.

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