On Friday 09 December 2005 22:34, Thomas Adam wrote:
Do you mean this from the point of the computer being compromised maliciously, or via your own tinkering? If the former, then never. If that latter, then only once.
A bit of both perhaps. My ISP told me that some critical system files had been damaged by hackers which caused the system to segfault on normal mode. I could log on in recovery moe and get my data files. I'm not sure however if the hacking was caused by my liberal application of open source files on the server without detailed security oversight.
One of the challenges I often set people, is to _fix_ their Linux box without reinstalling. It's a really good learning-curve, and through doing it, it's surprising at just how much one can learn. Of course, I realise that it isn't always that straight forward -- especially where the machine in question is in a critical environent.
I have done that on my home machine but was a bit nervy with a remote server. I also naively thought that paying someone to look after my server meant they would do just that. Their argument is that it was a root server that was managed by me (hence it was not very expensive).
Hardware failures though, tend to present themselves in many different ways -- but the precursor is usually where multiple applications that used to work, start to itermittently crash with SIGSERV or SIGABRT, or SEGFAULT.
The ISPs communiques seemed to point to a hardware failure which they claim was caused by malicious intrusions. Having said that, the ISP is Amen and they had industrial action over the summer (I couldn't get any help for 2 months) due to their takeover by Claranet and sacking of lots of people. Could it have been a disgruntled ex... With the ability of hindsight, I would not use Amen again. The trouble is that I needed a cheap server so that my 6th formers could learn the trade. They (me mostly) run a company to host and sell web sites to local schools, charities and companies. It was meant to earn credit for various bits of coursework but grew bigger than I really could cope with a full teaching load. It is also too big and time consuming for me to move elsewhere. This latest incident has meant lots of candle burning for me which I could do without as January exam season approaches. :(
-- Thomas Adam
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