Monday, September 13, 2004
How I spent my hurricane vacation
Well, that was pleasant.
First off, around the 24th of August, the server that
was hosting this site, swift.conman.org, was
compromised (through my login no less). Due to differences in opinion on
the situation (and seeing how the system does belong to Mark) he was kind
enough to give me until Sunday, September 5th
(nevermind a Class 3 hurricane coming through. Then again, Mark will be the
first to admit he isn't the most diplomatic of people).
So when we weren't preparing for Hurricane Frances, moving sites to a different server occupied my time. Then, once Hurricane Frances blew past, the server I moved the sites to got cracked.
It had nothing to do with the swift.conman.org compromise
since we have a very good idea as to who did it. And the major difference
between this compromise and the compromise to swift.conman.org
was the cracker deleting every site on the box, and making sure the box
had to be rebuilt from scratch (since with /bin,
/sbin and the kernel deleted as well, the server wouldn't be of
much use).
So while the National Hurricane Center was bouncing Ivan off of Florida, every moment I wasn't sleeping (or severely sleep deprived) was spent rebuilding three servers (the full extent of the damage) from scratch, and attempting to recover lost data.
Almost makes me pine for the days of getting denial of service attacks.
So once that was done, it meant copying my sites off of
swift.conman.org yet again. Which explains why I haven't been
around all that much during the past two weeks.
It's been a rather interesting two weeks.
And Hurricane Ivan has best be the last storm this year.
