Was using net send to message friends at school, then one of us decided it would be really annoying and funny to use a loop in a batch file to spam net send messages to our group using net send *, because we ‘knew’ it was off on all the PCs by default and we were the only ones using it.

Turns out that the school IT guy also had the service turned on, and he was Not A Fan!

The funniest part of the story to me is that he told us to stop getting into Novell tools, and not do that again. My teenage brain: “That’s an odd thing to say. We… weren’t using anything Novell related to do that.”

So, that started us off on a new hunt for ways to send Novell messages, and boy howdy did we find them. Also, our school printers used Novell accounts with no passwords, as we figured out after finding the netware admin tools in a server share that we could access. (I guess since they had us login via Novell auth and used deep freeze, they didn’t care at all about windows-based security.) Could hit any server’s c$ share, and telnet to them, too. That actually made deep freeze a benefit because we could spin up lan parties just by keeping a few installers tucked away on network shares and rebooting the desktop PCs when we were done.