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The Adventures of Luke Vaxhacker			Episode n-1

	As we enter the  scene, an Imperial  Multiplexer is trying  to
kill a consulate ship.  Many of their signals have gotten through, and
RS232 decides it's time to fork off a new process before this old ship
is destroyed.  His companion, 3CPU,  is following him only because  he
appears to know where he's going...

	"I'm going to regret this!"  cried 3CPU, as he followed  RS232
into the buffer.  RS232 closed the pipes, made the sys call, and their
process detached itself from the burning shell of the ship.

	The commander of  the Imperial Multiplexer  was quite  pleased
with the  attack. "Another  process just  forked, sir.  Instructions?"
asked the lieutenant.  "Hold your fire.  That last power failure  must
have caused a  trap thorough zero.   It's not using  any cpu time,  so
don't waste a signal on it."

	"We can't seem to  find the data  file anywhere, Lord  Vadic."
"What about  that forked  process?   It could  have been  holding  the
channel open,  and just  pausing.  If  any links  exist, I  want  them
removed or made inaccessable.  Ncheck the entire file system 'til it's
found, and nice it -20 if you have to."

	Meanwhile, in our wandering process...  "Are you sure you  can
ptrace this thing without causing a core dump?" queried 3CPU to RS232.
This thing's been striped, and  I'm in no mood  to try and debug  it."
The lone process finishes execution,  only to find our friends  dumped
on a lonely file system, with the setuid inode stored safely in RS232.
Not knowing what  else to  do, they  wandered around  until the  jawas
grabbed them.

	Enter our  hero,  Luke  Vaxhacker,  who is  out  to  get  some
replacement parts for his  uncle. The jawas wanted  to sell him  3CPU,
but 3CPU didn't know how  to talk directly to  an 11/40 with RSTS,  so
Luke would still needed some sort of interface for 3CPU to connect to.
"How about this little RS232 unit  ?" asked 3CPU. "I've delt with  him
many times before, and  he does an excellent  job at keeping his  bits
straight."  Luke was pressed for time,  so he took 3CPU's advice,  and
the three left before they could get swapped out.

	However, RS232 is not the type to stay put once you remove the
retaining screws.  He promptly scurried off into the the deserted disk
space.  "Great!" cried Luke,  "Now I've got this  little tin box  with
the only link to that file off floating in the free disk space.  Well,
3CPU, we better go find him before he gets allocated by someone else."
The two set off, and finaly traced RS232 to the home of PDP-1  Kenobi,
who was busily trying  to run an  icheck on the  little RS unit.   "Is
this thing yours?   His indirect address  are all goofed  up, and  the
size is gargatious.  Leave things like  this on the loose, and  you'll
wind up with dups everywhere.  However, I think I've got him fixed up.
It seems that he's has a link to a data file on the Are-Em Star.  This
could help the  rebel cause." "I  don't care about  that," said  Luke.
"I'm just trying to optimize my uncles schedualer."

	"Oh, forget about  that.  Dec  Vadic, who  is responsible  for
your fathers death, has probably already destroyed his farm in  search
of this little RS232.  It's time for you to leave this place, join the
rebel cause, and become a UNIX wizard! I know a guy by the name of Con
Solo, who'll fly us to the rebel base at a price."


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The Adventures of Luke Vaxhacker                            Episode n

Luke  was  feeling  rather  bored.   3CPU  could  get  to  be  rather
irritating and RS232 didn't really speak Luke's language.   Suddenly,
Luke felt someone's eyes  boring through the back  of his skull.   He
turned slowly to see...nothing.  A quiet voice came from somewhere in
front of him.

"Grasshopper, the carrier  is strong within  you." Luke froze,  which
was a good thing since his legs  were insisting that he run but  they
weren't likely to be particular  about direction.  Luke guessed  that
his odds of  getting lost in  the dense tree  structures were  pretty
good.  Unfortunately, the Bookie wasn't available.

"Yes. Very  strong,  but the  modulation  is yet  weak.  His  network
interface is  totally undeveloped,"  the  voice continued.   A  small
furry creature walked  out of the  woods as Luke  stared on.   Luke's
stomach had  now joined  the rest  of his  body in  loud  complaints.
Whatever was peering at him was  certainly small and furry, but  Luke
was quite sure that it didn't come from Alpha Centauri.

"Well, well,"  said the  creature  as it  rolled  its eyes  at  Luke.
"Frobozz,  y'know.   Morning,  name's   modem.   What's  your   game?
Adventure?  D&D? Or are you just  one of those Apple-pong types  that
hang around the store demonstrations?" Luke closed his eyes.  Perhaps
if he couldn't see it, it wouldn't notice him.

"H'mm," muttered the creature.  "Must use a different protocol.  @@@H
@@ @($@@@H }"@G$ @#@@G'(o% @@@@@%%H(b ?"

"No, no," stammered Luke.  "I don't speak EBCDIC.  I was sent here to
become a UNIX wizard.  Must have the wrong address."

"Right address,"  said the  creature.  "I'm  a UNIX  wizard.   Device
drivers a specialty.  Or do you prefer playing with virtual memory?"

Luke eyed  the creature  cautiously.  If  this was  what happened  to
system wizards after years of late night crashes, Luke wasn't sure he
wanted anything to do with it.   He felt a strange affection for  the
familiar microcomputers  of  his  home.  And  wasn't  virtual  memory
something that you got from drinking too much Coke?



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The Further Adventures of Luke Vaxhacker                  Episode n+1

The story thus  far:  Luke, PDP-1  and their 'droids  RS232 and  3CPU
have made good their  escape from the Imperial  Bus Signals with  the
aid of  Con Solo  and the  bookie, Two  Bacco.  The  Milliamp  Falcon
hurtles onward through system space.  Meanwhile, on a distant page in
user space...

Princess _LPA0:  was  ushered  into  the  conference  room,  followed
closely by Dec Vadic.  "Governor Tarchive," she spat, "I should  have
expected to find you holding  Vadics lead.  I recognized your  unique
pattern when  I  was first  brought  aboard." She  eyed  the  0177545
tatooed on his header coldly.

"Charming to the last,"  Tarchive declared menacingly.  "Vadic,  have
you retrieved any information?"

"Her resistance to  the logic probe  is considerable," Vadic  rasped.
"Perhaps we  would get  faster  results if  we increased  the  supply
voltage..."

"You've had your  chance, Vadic.  Now  I would like  the princess  to
witness the test that will  make this workstation fully  operational.
Today we enable the  -r beam option, and  we've chosen the  princess'
$HOME of /usr/alderaan as the primary target."

"No!   You  can't!   /usr/alderaan  is  a  public  account,  with  no
restricted permissions.  We have no backup tapes!  You can't..."

"Then name the rebel inode!" Tarchive snapped.

A voice announced  over a  hidden speaker  that they  had arrived  in
/usr.

"1248," she whispered, "They're on /dev/rm3.  Inode 1248." She turned
away.

Tarchive sighed with satisfaction.  "There, you see, Lord Vadic?  She
can be reasonable.  Proceed with the operation."

It took  several clock  ticks for  the words  to penetrate.   "What!"
_LPA0:  gasped.

"/dev/rm3 is  not a  mounted  filesystem," Tarchive  explained.   "We
require a more  visible subject to  demonstrate the power  of the  RM
STAR workstation.  We will mount an attack on /mnt/dantooine as  soon
as possible."

As the princess watched,  Tarchive reached over and  typed "ls" on  a
nearby terminal.   There was  a  brief pause,  there being  only  one
processor on board, and  the viewscreen showed,  ".: not found."  The
princess suddenly double- spaced and went off-line.



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The Even Further Adventures of Luke Vaxhacker             Episode n+2

The Milliamp Falcon hurtles on through system space...

Con Solo finished checking the various control and status  registers,
finally convinced himself that they had lost the Bus Signals as  they
passed the terminator.  As he returned from the I/O page, he  smelled
smoke.  Solo wasn't  concerned--the Bookie  always got  a little  hot
under the collar  when he was  losing at chess.   In fact, RS232  had
just executed a particularly clever MOV that had blocked the Bookie's
data paths.  The Bookie, who had  been setting the odds on the  game,
was caught  holding all  the cards.   A little  strange for  a  chess
game...

Across the room, Luke was too busy practicing bit-slice technique  to
notice the commotion.

"On a  word boundary,  Luke," said  PDP-1. "Don't  just hack  at  it.
Remember, the Bytesaber is  the weapon of the  Red-eye Night.  It  is
used to trim offensive  lines of code.   Excess handwaving won't  get
you anywhere.  Listen for the Carrier."

Luke turned back to the drone,  which was humming quietly in the  air
next to  him.   This time  Luke's  actions complemented  the  drone's
attacks perfectly.

Con Solo, being an unimaginative hacker, was not impressed.   "Forget
this bit-slicing stuff.  Give me a good ROM blaster any day."

"~~j~~hhji~~," said  Kenobie,  with  no clear  inflection.   He  fell
silent for a few seconds, and reasserted his control.

"What happened?" asked Luke.

"Strange," said PDP-1.  "I  felt a momentary  glitch in the  Carrier.
It's equalized now."

"We're coming up on user space,"  called Solo from the CSR.  As  they
cruised safely through stack frames,  the emerged in the new  context
only to be bombarded by freeblocks.

"What the..." gasped Solo.  The screen showed clearly:
		/usr/alderaan: not found
"It's  the  right inode,  but it's been cleared!  Twoie, where's  the
nearest file?"

"3  to  5  there's  one..."  the  Bookie  started  to  say,  but  was
interrupted by a bright flash off to the left.

"Imperial TTY fighters!" shouted Solo.   "A whole DZ of them!   Where
are they coming from?"

"Can't be far from  the host system," said  Kenobie.  "They all  have
direct EIA connections."

As Solo began to give chase, the ship lurched suddenly.  Luke noticed
the link count was at 3 and climbing rapidly.

"This is  no  regular file,"  murmured  Kenobie.  "Look  at  the  ODS
directory structure ahead!  They seem to have us in a tractor beam."

"There's no way we'll unlink in time," said Solo.  "We're going in."