Hey, we're back!

[Fearless Freep]

Haven't been able to reach this site in afew days...

[Andrew]

Three days to be exact.  I am looking around, trying to make sure everything is working correctly.

I posted an explanation of the problem to both Jabootu's message board and on the b-movie mailing list.  Here is a quick cut and paste:

he site should be up sometime tonight, perhaps as late as tomorrow morning.

Got in touch with Gary and the server was breached by some script kiddies with a rootkit. Probably the Samba installation, since that just had a pair of root exploits in the last month and had not been patched yet. They were trying to make it into a DDOS box. Unfortunately, their inexperience with the "look, I am a hacker" program meant that they royally hosed Linux and Gary had to reload it. It was deemed quicker than trying to fix things, since the personal edition of BRU (backup software) does not let you restore with just a boot floppy or CD. The script kiddies also left complete logs of everything they did, because even simply erasing the logs seems to have been beyond them.

The thing that sucks? I was on guard duty and didn't find out until it had been down a few hours. Gary noticed what they were up to (the box had a couple of trips) just in time to see it go down - probably about five or ten minutes after the breach. However, he was on his way to an important meeting with clients that lasted all afternoon.

Well, once in over four years - that is not so bad. Usually Gary or myself has noticed someone trying (a good effort happens every two or three months) and cut them off in time and fixed the hole - sometimes just to be on the paranoid side. It is the old trade off between usability and security. Just the right (meaning wrong) day for it to happen I guess.

[raj]

That really bites.  I had the website at my old job hacked once, it was easier to just reinstall & rebuild.  I hate those vandals.

[The Burgomaster]

Thank God . . . I was in advanced stages of withdrawal . . .

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[Evan3]

Thank god Andrew, one more day and I would have been shivering naked in a ditch. I also feared you may have expelled me!!! I was sad.

[Andrew]

And now it looks like Scifilm.org is down.  Ugly week...

Evan3 said:
"I also feared you may have expelled me!!! I was sad."

I try not to go and ban people without warning them beforehand.  I dropped "tuck" into the deny for the Message Board section about a week ago.  He was posting over and over, including answering his own posts, as different names.   Hard to hide when you have the same IP address and all the posts having the same spelling/grammar errors.

By far the big reason I put IP addresses in the deny pool is because someone is using a program to suck the whole site down.  It can make things get really slow.  I did change the directory where the movies are stored to a new name about a week ago.  That improved things, because apparently lots of people were passing email links to the video files around.  I watched the error log go crazy.  Will have to make doing that a standard practice every few months.

[Evan3]

Good to know I dont p**s u off than, I dont know enough about computers to do any of that stuff.

[spike]

thought tho

[Nathan Shumate]

You are, of course, tracking the guilty parties back to their parents' houses to make particularly embarrassing examples of them, right?

[Flangepart]

And sending Vinnie and Guido after them, to break their fingers, Right?