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One day our network (both internally and out the DSL line) in our office is slow. Like dead slow. The technical term we used was "mutt dog slow".
I crack open Etherape and see MASSIVE traffic coming off the dark desktop of an employee who had called in sick and was working from home. Something real serious is happening on that machine, and it's saturating all the bandwidth in the router... and nobody's sitting there. Spooky! Turning on the monitor is no help--it shows a normal suse login screen. As a matter of policy, only the developer has root on his own machine and is completely responsible for it, so I can't even log in to see what's running.
I get that developer on AIM from his house. I ask him if something strange is running on his box. He hedges a bit, then confesses that he's got a remote X session running through an SSH tunnel he'd set up the day before (turns out this was a "planned" sick day). Not VNC--a raw networked X session. Running KDE, no less. He's happily working in his work environment from his home machine, sucking up every available bit of office bandwidth. How very convenient for him!
Guess what port got blocked on the router that day?
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