hunt: The god of doorways

I am behind the power curve now, because of some frightening technical issues that cropped up in the past 24 hours or so.

Nothing network related (this time); instead, one of my external drives I use for a data archive (think: family photos and scanned documents) began spitting out errors.

It was suspect for at least a few days beforehand, with slow transfers and suspicious behavior. Luckily I copied everything off there — in the conventional manner, with no error messages — before some 20- to 30-hour tests.

It’s disappointing mostly because I bought that drive only a little more than a year ago, and anticipated it lasting much, much longer.

Rather than rant against the state of affairs in the hard drive industry, I’ll show you hunt.

2013-11-27-4dkln41-hunt-nosudo

That’s what hunt looks like if you don’t invoke superuser privileges. Something roguelike, multiplayer, with vi-ish movement and a text-based display.

Here’s what it looks like if you can rank yourself among those with godlike powers.

2013-11-27-4dkln41-hunt-sudo

Not a game, at all. Now we’re into specific network security functions, and as you can see from the menu options, they don’t mince words. Depending on the level of mischief you intend, hunt puts you in the driver’s seat.

I won’t pretend I know much about those things, mostly because I don’t know much about those things. All pretension aside, you’ll need to look elsewhere for a tutorial. I’m clueless.

On the other hand, I give hunt an extra point for — depending on your perspective — including a nontrivial roguelike as a time-waster … or as a distraction for the masses, keeping them ignorant and pacified.

Screenshots are Debian; the AUR version wouldn’t build for me. Plus one for the red swirly team. šŸ˜‰

5 thoughts on “hunt: The god of doorways”

  1. Curtis

    If the drive is only slightly over a year old, I imagine that it should still be under warranty. I’m not sure what kind of guarantees there are from a HW vendor from country to country. But typically in the US, drives are warrantied for at least 3 years.

    1. K.Mandla Post author

      Good point. I moved internationally back in July though, and I don’t think I kept the receipt or invoice. Hmm. šŸ˜¦

  2. Ethan

    I’m wondering, are those the same program. I have seen where the PATH for rrt and a normal user are different. So, is it possible that you have a network utility called hunt installed into a place that root uses, but a normal user doesn’t, and a game in a place where the normal user can see it, and root can’t? This is, anyhow a really cool trick: plausible deniability.

    1. K.Mandla Post author

      That’s a very real possibility, and one I admit I hadn’t thought of. I’ll have to check.

      My first instinct when I saw the application “hunt” was to think of the old “Hunt the Wumpus” game out of bsd-games, but that executes with wump and not hunt.

      Let me double-check this tomorrow, but I’m 99 44/100 percent sure there’s nothing else installed on the system called “hunt.”

  3. Pingback: Correction: A tale of two hunts | Inconsolation

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