Get On, Clip In, Fall Off

Back in action

Well, that was an eventful few days. My web server stopped working properly just before I was due to go off and be a best man last Saturday, so I hurriedly repointed the DNS entries at the uffish.net wiki that runs on my home machine before going to Cambridge.

The next day I went to France for a few days (see referenced photo and pictures of the Tour de France) and discovered on the Eurostar that they'd revived the machine's disk which had become powered down mysteriously. More alarmingly, the machine had generated vast amounts of network activity the day before - well, it had generated about 4GB but received 6GB - which makes me think of DDOS attacks rather than a warez related compromise, and I can't find anything immediately wrong with the machine. Irritating, especially as it's going to cost me a lot in bandwidth charges.

The machine's now back in action with ruthless new firewall rules - which is a shame as I've always preached the importance of system-level security rather than cowering behind firewalls, but I guess that's life on the brave new Internet. The Wiki performed well over the past few days, but it's good to have the proper stuff back in service.

Oh yeah, and this near miss has certainly reminded me of the importance of taking backups. I guess I should take some sometime..
Posted by mpk at July 15, 2005 6:32 PM