When I rebooted the faintfuzzies server 10 days ago most everything was broken. It required a complete rebuild of the software and in Gentoo Linux parlance that means “emerge -eD world”. Or for you binary guys and dolls that is compiling every single package from scratch. That is the only way to know that here are not foul badies still in the system. When I took a look at my system for the first time with a rescues disk I discovered that every file/config in all directories with the exception of Var and Home had been deleted.

The weird thing was that all the directories trees were in place just the files were missing!! Go figure. This server has been working fine for a while, but I guess someone took offence to the changes I was making. Having completed the servers’ first security audit, I found number issues that needed to be address. So for a week prior to the failure, I’d been diligently attempting to plug all the holes.

Someone out there didn’t like me. I’ve been throughly going through my logs and there is some suspicious activity, however nothing yet that I can nail it down. But trust me if the server was hacked and the person was sloppy I’ll figure it out. Of course if they where very good there is a possibility I’ll never figure it out.

There is one possibility I’m intentionally ignoring… the culprit is me. As computer techs like to say, 99.99% of the time the problem lays between the seat and the keyboard. But in my defence I don’t even know a command in Linux that can delete files while leaving the directory tree in place.

Categories: Computers
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