[Simh] EXT :Re: Releasing terspy.mar - vax/vms terminal spy program

[Hittner, David T [US] (MS)]

Oh no… management frequently asked VMS admins to ‘spy’ on general users for a few reasons back in the day, before the politically-correct era.

-          Make sure users were not defrauding the company [stealing inventory with illegal transactions, etc.]  (without user consent)

-          Watch user sessions when managers reported various discipline problems (without user consent)

-          Debugging full-screen application behavior from a remote location by having the user walk us through what they did (with user consent)


SET HOST/LOG sessions are difficult to use to see where full-screen applications went wrong, since you have to manually interpret all of the logged VT escape sequences. ☹

For a while, there was a company selling a SPY utility for VMS, as well as freebie versions floating around. The commercial version allowed the watcher to enter data in the watched session by using a special command sequence to enable remote data entry. I don’t recall any of the freebie versions ever allowing data entry from the watcher, for fairly obvious security reasons.

There was also another highly privileged program on the DECUS tapes, GLOGIN, which allowed a privileged user to login as another user, so that you could see what application behavior occurred within the context of a specific user. I found a weird bug in one of our application programs that only occurred when the username was exactly 7 characters long using GLOGIN to login as the user who had reported the bug that we couldn’t duplicate ourselves. ☺

David

From: Simh <simh-bounces at trailing-edge.com> On Behalf Of Robert Armstrong
Sent: Wednesday, March 25, 2020 10:23 AM
To: simh at trailing-edge.com
Subject: EXT :Re: [Simh] Releasing terspy.mar - vax/vms terminal spy program

>$ SET HOST/LOG will log your own session. This program logs someone else's session.

  That’s true – I’m assuming the person being spied upon wants to be spied on.

Bob

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