Rabbits and ferrets
A Uni I worked at a long time back got a cluster of minis and serial terminals to replace the old punched-card-masticating mainframe that had catered for the student and academic computing workload previously. The minicomputers were very new -- rumour had it they had serial numbers starting 0001, 0002 etc. and the OS was similarly fresh from the oven and only half-baked.
A group of first-year students, doing Maths IIRC, discovered these wonderful toys and, being infantile to the extreme, proceeded to break them on a monotonously regular basis. For example the Rabbit team wrote scripts and later programs to create a subdirectory in the file system, copy itself into that subdirectory then launch an instance and create a sub-sub-directory, digging its way down until something broke. The Ferret team wrote scripts and programs to go after the Rabbit programs and kill them before something broke. The Rabbits usually won and then the people running the computing department had to go round and reset the computers which had gone Bonk!
Eventually the Problem Children were taken aside, it was made clear that they were getting in the way of people doing Real Work on their shiny toys and they should desist. The computer manufacturer, having heard of these exploits thanks to the error reports the Uni sent them donated another mini to the Uni as a crash-test-dummy machine since the information they were getting back was quite valuable for their OS developers. The Problem Children were allowed to indulge themselves on this firewalled machine, the academics and other students could get uninterrupted machine time on the cluster and everyone was happy, that is until the end-of-year exams when the Problem Children all failed to pass. Sad trombone.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
