My 5 Minutes of Very Limited Fame

During the dot com boom, companies were doing everything to attract and retain workers. IBM had a committee devoted to making the software group a cool place to work. Break rooms with snack and drink machines, pool tables, foosball, etc popped up on every floor in our complex. My manager at the time was on this committee and we managed the servers used by everyone in our group. So he was the one asked about what it would take to set up a game server that people could use on break, lunch, or after work. Which of course led him to Chris and myself since we were two of the most senior admins on the team. Our task was to set up a server with whatever was the popular game at the time and to determine what was the network impact. Obviously if it was too much, putting the server into "production" mode would be a no-go. So we said sure and that one night that week we'd stay late and get it going in our own time and produce a network impact analysis. We were told that, no, this was an official duty we could start right then and there and this was to be considered a normal duty. I couldn't help myself. I had to ask my manager, "You're saying you are going to pay us to play games?"

So needless to say we had Quake 2 with the Lithium mod up and running. There was a solid core group who would play on our lunches and stay late a few days a week. At home I moved on to Battlefield 1942 and joined a group playing Battlefield 2 when it came out.

The downside to online games is the people who use modifications or programs to cheat. BF2 was no exception, but it also had statistics tracking. So the cheaters wanted their stats, but often didn't like the fact their name was out there. Well they had a way around it since the server they connected to took the name the client transmitted rather than checking with the master stats server. Since they most often wanted their stats, they had to send their real player ID number. Accessing the names and player IDs on a server was straight forward. As was checking with EA's master server what name was associated with a giver player ID. I quickly put together a web app on my website that would check a given server and report back who was name hacking. With great creativity I called it the Name Hack Buster. I shared it with my buddies and one of them proceeded to talk it up on a few BF2 forums around the web. Suddenly my site that saw very little traffic was getting thousands of hits and I had other BF2 server admins asking if they could have a copy of the program.

I also attracted the very negative attention of some of the cheaters. I couldn't join a server without it being crashed or harassed by aim bots. So what did I do? Well I was attached to the name I was playing under since I'd used it as my online alias since 1991. Still it was just a game and I'd already maxed out everything on that account. So I started a new one and had the fun of ranking that one up. The cheats were getting caught and banned by server admins, which was a good thing in my book.

The other difficulty? Well after 6 million hits in one year my hosting company got pissy about it so I had to move to a new hosting provider.