[PLUG] A moment of silence please

[Kyle Hayes]

On Thursday 14 August 2003 15:09, Michael Rasmussen wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 14, 2003 at 12:30:23PM -0700, Steve Beattie wrote:
> > Call me silly, but having an internet connected machine be woefully out
> > of date w.r.t. security updates is not something to brag about (yes,
> > there've been security vulnerabilities fixed in the 2.2 kernels since
> > 2.2.12 was released).
>
> Point taken.  When the box was directly connected to the internet it
> would get hacked into about every nine months starting in 1998.
> I learned a lot. :)  Especially about how to clean up after an attacker
> without taking the box offline.
>
> After I put it behind a firewall it was never compromised.

It could have been 2.2.14.  There's at least one really nice filesystem 
corruption bug in that one.  Push the load on the disk subsystem up high 
enough for long enough and, voila, instant file puree.  Wheee!

This hit a company I worked for on the DB server.  MySQL gets quite cranky 
when the index files are toast.  Can't imagine why.  We even saw blocks of 
nulls appear in log files during operation (not after a crash where this can 
happen sometimes).  Needless to say this made the slave replica less than 
trustworthy too. 

Best,
Kyle