CATAWBA-WEST-L Archives

From: "Derick S. Hartshorn" <>
Subject: Re: subscription
Date: Sat, 19 Sep 1998 09:26:37 -0400

At 07:35 PM 9/18/98 -0700, you wrote:
>I have not had any mail from Catawba West lately did I lose my subscription
>while my server was out of order? I hate to miss anything.
>
>Agnes Cloninger

Agnes, and all:

Mail has been slow but I have seen a few lately. This may explain some of
the problems:

> NEWS AND NOTES FROM ROOTSWEB
>
>THAT WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS (by Ellen Seebacher and Tim Pierce).
>On Saturday, we lost lists.rootsweb.com -- one of RootsWeb's two
>main mailing list servers -- when it was penetrated by a cracker.
>We were cracked through the inattentiveness of a user with
>privileged access to the machine, and will be more careful about
>granting direct access to RootsWeb servers in future. There is no
>sensitive or private data on this machine, only mailing list
>archives, so no one's privacy was compromised. However, the
>individual who entered the system wiped out two directories
>essential to running the machine ("/etc" and "/var/log"), which
>meant that to make the machine usable again we'd need to
>reinstall part of it from scratch.
>
>Brian Leverich worked through the weekend to rebuild the server
>and reinstall the operating system, but the process did not go
>smoothly; mysterious hardware troubles kept cropping up. While
>wrestling with these problems he decided to use the "down time"
>to good advantage by replacing the old machine, a Pentium Pro 200
>with slow 60-nanosecond EDO memory, with a Pentium II 400 with
>fast 6-nanosecond SDRAM memory, estimated to improve performance
>by a factor of 2-6.
>
>Dr. Leverich assembled the new server over Saturday night and
>Sunday. On Monday, Tim Pierce and Randy Winch went over the
>operating system painstakingly, file by file, to ensure that the
>intruder left behind no back doors or Trojan horses. On Monday
>night, Tim and Karen Isaacson rebuilt the missing /etc directory,
>from memory and a little detective work. By late Monday night,
>the new server had begun processing the backlogged mail that had
>accumulated over the weekend. Fortunately, the extra work on the
>new server paid off: the megabytes of backed-up mail that would
>have taken the old machine days to process were finished off by
>the new system in about 12 hours. So although our down time was
>about a day and a half longer than we expected, the result is a
>RootsWeb that's faster, more efficient and better equipped to
>serve the needs of Internet genealogists.
>

This thread:

• Re: subscription by "Derick S. Hartshorn" <>