No Aids Racing

I am going to upgrade the web server this weekend, making the NAR forums unavailable for up to 6 hours (more likely 1 hour, but you never know). The exact time of the upgrade has still not been decided, but Saturday evening or Sunday afternoon (CET) are most likely.

Old server:
Celeron 300MHz, 256MB SDRAM, 3GB IDE system disk

New server:
Dual Pentium3 700MHz, 1GB SDRAM ECC, 9GB 10k rpm U2W SCSI system disk (with an identical disk as mirror)

Both machines are running FreeBSD 4.7-RELENG, Apache 1.3.27, mod_php4, phpBB2 and MySQL 3.23. They are also running a bunch of other applications, including VPN, NAT, firewall (ipfw) and file sharing using samba and NFS.

Well, the server has been upgraded (replaced) and everything is running smooth again. Unfortunately an internet worm attack (DDoS using MS SQL) took out my dynamic DNS provider (No-IP), so the server has been unavailable for most of the day even though it was only powered down for approximately 90 minutes.

/Sysadmin with a powerslide

Well, the server took a nose dive at 16.30 CET (4.30pm CET, 10.30am EST) today and stopped responding to network events. This effectively took down the forums.

I am still trying to figure out exactly what happened, but I have a few ideas that I'm investigating right now. The prime suspect is the code that mounts Windows shares in the Unix file system (SMBfs). The server is acting as a workgroup file server for a few local clients, and I have recently experimented with creating a huge virtual filesystem consisting of local filesystems and remote NFS and SMB filesystems. Maybe the SMBfs code triggered a bug in FreeBSD that stopped it from responding.

/Daniel

Spam posting? lol

Hah

is it possible to have a name like that and still be a geust? Aparently it is.....but I don't think I ever saw it before....?

Don't look now.. but I think the forum is haunted *hums the twilight zone theme*

heheh

*edit* deleted the latest spam post

This thread is haunted....how cool is that

killahead wrote:heheh

*edit* deleted the latest spam post

This thread is haunted....how cool is that

Not cool hehe, you will notice m8.

I know a different forum wich is haunted as well by a bot wich auto generate new user name and drops on spam. I think this is not a bot, perhaps you can give an ip ban ??

Sry forgot to log in

I've banned the IP. I'm sure there are multiple bots though, so I'm not sure how effective the ban will be.

/Daniel

I really can't understand some hackers..
I mean I have a lot of respect for the difficulty of hacking / reverse engineering (probably cause I have never learned that aspect of programming myself), but I fail to see the motive for writing a bot that attacks forums just to annoy people.
What is the point? Why do this when you can put your talents to use elsewhere?

Why do some people do graffitis? Same thing.

Well on this case its a guess thing, you post link, and somewere youl catch one who will click on few link, you get trafick, more trafic you have, more you can ask money from sponsor... more you get paid. Not always the case, but some are paid to do this.