OwlManAtt’s Blog

Well, the main eC site is once again alive and well. Everything seems to be functioning properly.

If I recall correctly, I left you all off with the dist-upgrade in my last entry. So here’s what happend next.

The dist-upgrade went smoothly. When we went to install a new kernel (and thus, need to reboot), all hell broke out. There was a small error in the lilo config (forgot to define root). After a few panics, we got that sorted out, and all was well. For a few minutes.

With 2.6 running, I removed some extra packages and then installed Apache 1.3 to put up a “Just a bit longer, kids!” page. After that, I did the first firewall ruleset. When I activated this rule set, the server promptly dropped off of the internet. A bit too secure, perhaps?

I ran the ruleset by the suave and debonaire linuxwolf from EFnet, and he made a number of modifications. After about two hours, EV1 finally rebooted the server, and the new ruleset went in with minor tweaking. (Like fixing stop. When I say stop, I mean stop filtering, not stop networking. Damn ruleset.)

Five hours of sleep, and right back to work. I started the backup uploads from Kato to Plain, then slimmed down the apache1.3 config by about 600 lines. It had a few errors, but nothing that couldn’t be fixed in a minute or two. So, with Apache 1.3 running (and supporting virtual hosts, hooah!), I began on MySQLd.

Oh boy, was that sure fun. It installed no problem, but when it came time to restore the db backup…

You see, the backup was ~2gb text file contaning all of Plain’s databases. One. Single. 2GB. File. This wouldn’t be a problem under normal circumstances, but MYSQLDUMP ALLOW SYNTAX ERRORS WHEN IT WAS CRAPPING IT OUT.

Seriously, the next time I see a MySQL AB employee, he’s getting beat with the stupid stick. SInce it had about 10 errors spread out between 7.5 million lines, I did not have much fun.

I opened it on the server with nano, which took about twenty minutes of 70% CPU usage and 80% memory useage on the part of the text editor process. After that, I had to search for each CREATE TABLE section and check the column names against the mysql reserved word list. Then I wrote the file out, which took forty minutes. Of course, I didn’t fix all of the errors at once (stupid me), so this process took eleven hours.

Finally MySQL was set up. I installed php4-mod for Apache, then started her up. Behold, eCri…wait, what the fuck? The pages using the database were all blank…

Leif popped on from some Windows XP box in CT at this point and told me to install php4-mysql. Hah, whoops.

NOW, behold, eCritters! For…one minute? What the fuck?

Well, apache has decided to stop serving requests after about a minute. I beat the config file to death with a spoon, but it would still keep getting lazy after a minute. Not knowing what to do, and being 3am, I got SIX hours of sleep (yay!).

So I woke up, prodded the site to see if EV1 was just having network trouble last night, and found the same problem. So I got pissed off, dyked Apache 3.1 out, slapped Apache 2 on the server, whacked the php modules into line, and modified the config files slightly.

Tada. Instant eC. And it works. I think there’s room for some small improvement, but damnit it works. I’ll tune it up later.

After this I realized that register.php needed GD, so I installed that and restarted apache. No problems, and register displayed fine.

Restocks, on the other hand…Hah, I have no idea if any of the crons are going to work. I mean, are they coded as part of the site? Or do they need a cronjob to run them? Leif didn’t tell me, so if there aren’t any restocks, oh well, too damn bad, life goes on.

All that’s left to be done is redeploy the other sites (easy enough to do). But that happens when Leif gets back, because he only uploaded the eC code.

Yea. I still need to set up an ftpd/pop3/imap/smtp server. But not now, I’m tired and cranky and not in the mood for fucking around.

Mornin’ kids. Any of you wondering what I’ve been up to over the past few days? Yes? Good.

Well, eC’s server was broken into again. Leif figured it out when he ssh’d in to see why it had been so slow over the past few days and most of the commands segfaulted. After that, he initiated operation back-everything-up-within-the-next-four-minutes.

One of the first things extracted from the server was /var/log, which I got a copy of. When I went to examine the logs, I found that anything recent had been trunctuated. Useless.

Or so I thought. On a closer examination, very valuable information was found in /var/log/apache/error_log. Enough information to allow me to track the compromise down to one man: br0k3d of #nova@irc.rizon.org.

He was involved with some Brazilian warez d00d group, and they needed servers for their warez chan. He was nice enough to tell me that his modified version of the Anti Sany Worm was used to get into the server via phpBB, and then the server joined his IRC room and was scanned for vulns. Since it was running RedHat 7.3 with the shittiest repos in the word, vulns were numerous.

After that, shv4, a rather nasty rootkit, was installed. This thing replaced a number of binaries and libraries. It also managed to damage the system beyond reasonable repair. (Damnit, when you write a rookit, CAN YOU PEOPLE HAVE IT CHECK TO MAKE SURE IT’S COMPATIBLE WITH THE OS? Honestly, IT HOSED THE SYSTEM! What the HELL is the point of keeping root on a useless box?)

Even though RH7.3 was hopelessly out of date, hopelessly damaged, and just generally stupid, I tried to repair it anyway. I sort of half-fixed it. Httpd could start, so meh.

That, however, was only a temporary solution. Having a server that broken running several websites is like asking to be poked in the eye with a dagger.

We had two options: Require an OS restore for $30 bucks and get RH7.3 back (The best you can get is RH9 for $100, but that’s EOL’d, so it’s still pretty useless), or switch hosts. A host with decent prices is a rare find, so that wasn’t looking like much of an option.

We were going to go for the restore. But I had an idea: Installing Debian via SSH. SInce there was a good chance that it would fail, we could just proceed as planned and have the OS reinstalled. But if it worked, $30 could be saved, and eC would have decent packages on apt.

And so began a two-day Debian installation. Oh boy, was it weird. The guide we went by can be found here.

Two reboots were required, and both failed. All I can say is kudos to EV1’s DataCenter team. Despite their lack of any proper English and spelling whatsoever, without their stupidity, this installation could have never happened.

You see, RH7.3 had configuration files for lilo and grub. I thought the bootloader it used was grub (grub is more noticable. Sue me.), so I had reconfigured grub instead of lilo. When we rebooted, it tried to go into RedHat 7.3, and it choked to death.

EV1 made an offer: A free four-hour keyboard-mouse-video setup through a java-enabled browser. It would be like sitting in front of the server. At this point, I went to sleep, thinking all hope was lost. Leif realized that the server was using lilo and fixed it.

In the morning I pinged the server, ssh’d in, and my jaw dropepd in shock. Debian was running. I removed some packages we didn’t need, and hurried off to school.

When I got home, Leif explained the magic to me. He also told me it was loading the wrong ethernet module, and that he had fixed the module configuration to load it on boot.

So, I finished the install and rebooted. It didn’t come back up. Tickets were sent to EV1, and another four hours of KVM useage was aquired. The config file Leif had fixed for loading the ethernet module had been regenerated by something, and a proper fix was put in place. The server was rebooted once more into Debian.

And here we are now. Apt-get dist-upgrade is running to get us to testing, because stable packages are hopelessly out-of-date. Testing will be moved to stable within the next two months anyway. Again, sue me.

Yup. Back to work.

Just an interesting note: NewsForge ripped off my idea and ran a story on Windows viruses under Linux.

Whee, I’ve been ripped off by a major news orginization. I feel special.

As of late I have been playing Zangband, a rouge-like game in tty1. In between monster killing sessions, I switch back to tty7 to check slashdot/gAIM/eC/etc.

During one of these short breaks, I noticed that I had an e-mail. It could have been anything, from a scosug message to spam. I check, and find another one of these classics:
=========================================
Dear user of OwlManAtt.com gateway e-mail server,

Your e-mail account will be disabled because of improper using in next
three days, if you are still wishing to use it, please, resign your
account information.

For more information see the attached file.

For security purposes the attached file is password protected. Password is “81736″.

The Management,
The OwlManAtt.com team http://www.owlManAtt.com
=========================================

And attached to it is some zip file which can only contain a virus. (Come on, spoofed message, password protected zip file that prevents antivirus scanners from looking at the file, AND bad grammar? It can only be a virus!).

Being bored out of my mind and lacking anything to do at all, I unzip the file, knowing that it can only be a windows virus, and that I am in no danger at all. It has some stupid cryptic file name, and opening it in nano or a hex editor reveals nothing of interest.

So, I say to myself, what the hell? I’ve always wanted to see what would happen if a virus was run under WINE, and I didn’t have anything better to do.

$ su
Password:
# useradd -h /home/crapaccount crapaccount;mkdir /home/crapaccount
# cp /home/owlmanatt/.wine /home/crapaccount/;chmod;chown;bla bla bla

The only reason I created a seperate account to run the virus under was JUST IN CASE something went horribly wrong with WINE. The chance of the virus actually doing any damage under Linux is something like 1 to eighty-billion-googolplex, but I’m a tad paranoid.

So with the wine configs in place, I prepare for the moment of truth. What WOULD happen? Would it go after the fake_windows partition? Would it print a message? Would it just silently die?

No, of course not. I’d forgotten the CARDINAL RULE of using WINE: It does not work when you want it to.

crapaccount@bell:~/.wine/fake_windows$ wine ojvyteie.exe
err:module:MODULE_LoadLibraryExA Loading of native DLL C:WindowsSystemiphlpapi.dll failed, check this file ! (GetLastError 193)
err:module:PE_fixup_imports Module (file) iphlpapi.dll (which is needed by C:ojvyteie.exe) not found

Blarg. Useless crap. WINE can’t even run a virus properly.

Greetings once again to my fanclub/assorted readers. I’ve just realized that this is January, and my freshmen year at Career is about half-way through.

So why don’t I update you all on how this year is going, hm? You’ll love this.

Two weeks before the midterm, and two of our teachers leave. One had a replacement waiting, so that didn’t do much harm to Keyboarding. (Actually, that’ll keep loads of people from failing, because Ms. Garris had about 75% of the class with grades under 60% when she left, and the new teacher is giving us 100s for assignments just for trying to do them. Won’t help the bloke with the 11 much, but whatever.)

The other teacher that quit was our Algebra teacher. He was not replaced. The school is currently seeking a new teacher for us. And oh boy, does that mean we are screwed…

It took them nearly three months to find us a temporary English and Keyboarding teacher. The subs we had in those classes didn’t make us do a damned thing, or even bother teaching, for that matter. Since neither of these classes are ever hard, I didn’t worry.

But we are lacking an algebra teacher. Everyone in that class except for myself and Meghan are also in Algebra Lab, meaning they need extra help. And that extra help comes in the form of the special ed algebra DVD set. (This thing has ‘cute’ bugs doing math with ‘amusing antics’ thrown in. We’ve had to watch them three times in algebra. Every time we watch one I can feel my sanity draining away and the urge to kill rise.)

So the lack of teacher to finish teaching what will be on the midterm and review (read as: teach everything again three minutes before the test is given and still be expected to give you the answer to every other question), I really worry. Not as much about my grade, but how having half the class get zeros will make us look.

I figure I can bullshit through the test like I always manage to do, but something may come up. This happens to be the only test that I’m worring about, including the Spanish one.

Yup. Back to my project, then.

EDIT:
Suddenly, I feel like adding to this entry. I don’t know why, but I shall.

I’m bloody amazed with my nanowrimo. I never finished the thing (I haven’t looked at the text in months, and I probably won’t ever read it because I’ll hate my work), but the fact that I wrote twenty eight thousand words in the period of seventeen days shocks me.

According to the report card, I spent about sixty eight hours writing it. When time off of school is taken out (time that I can’t use), that means I spent 23% of my free time working on it in those 17 days.

Daamn. Where did all of that time come from? 1677 words per day (something like 2 and a half pages, I think). I had trouble writing the stupid little paper for world civ tonight, but I managed to write better than half of a novel in 17 days?

I make myself wonder. I really do.

EDIT AGAIN:
No end to this tonight, is there? It’s rare to find me editing once in a week, nevermind twice in a night. But shit happens.

This news has just reached me. The whole story, not just the ruling. When I read it, I nearly cried.

For those too lazy, I shall summarize for you. A court ruled that stickers stating that ‘Evolution is a theory, not a fact’ put in biology books had to be removed because they were sponsoring religions, which is against the consitutuion (of course).

And thank Tux for that. I always thought this sort of story was some sick urban legend, designed to make fun of the ubar-anal political correctness in America’s broken-down school system.

But I guess I was wrong. A school put stickers telling us that evolution, our best theory on how humans and the rest of the life on Earth, came to be is, in fact, only a theory, and that we should keep an open mind. (Read as: Creationism r0xx0r!!!!!1oneoneoneeleven!11) The stickers were added because 2,000 parents bitched and moaned about their kids learning evolutionism.

Guess what, you whiney fucks? YOU ARE FULL OF SHIT. GO STRAIT TO HELL. DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT TWO HUNDRED FUCKING DOLLARS.

You are all MORONS. The book is about SCIENCE. It is *NOT* one of your Chistian storybooks about a superhero named Jesus and his sidekick Rocky Peter saving the world from sin and darkness. It’s about EXPLAINABLE, DEFENDABLE, ALL-AROUND WONDERFUL FACTS.

Yes, that’s right - FACTS. Not stories about God springing out of nowhere (which sort of contradicts the idea of a God creating life - He’s life, where the fuck did he come from?) and slapping down some water on a ball of rock which already existed and calling it Earth.

No no, right-wing christian bible-thumping bastards! A FACT is something that you can PROVE. Not wonder about. Not preach about endlessly without giving me any explanation whatsoever.

The fact that nearly *TWO THOUSAND* parents complained about the book teaching evolution scares the living shit out of me. What kind of people would piss and moan about that, of all things? Do you have any life AT ALL?

I realize that, for some odd reason, you find this Jesus cat to be really hip. I can almost accept that, because you aren’t shoving it in my face and saying ‘HI LOOK THIS IS JESUS HE IS KEWL WE ALL LUVE HIM KTHXBYE OWLY TOWLY OWLY TOWLY HOW DUZ UR GARDEN GROW LOLLOLLOL’.

But honestly, DO YOU HAVE A FUCKING LIFE? I recon that *I* put you to shame life-wise, if you have time to call up a school and moan about your kid learning properly. Get some hobbies, you fucking nutcases. Pick your nose, watch the telly, call your mom - ANYTHING. Just LEAVE THE GODDAMN CHILDREN ALONE.

Gah. Right-wing-Christian-bible-thumping parents should have their children taken away from them. I don’t want people like that fucking around with the future. Keep crapping all over the enviorment like good old people, and leave us youths the hell alone. We’ll need to know FACTS later on to clean up your mess and unfuck the world, because SuperJesus sure isn’t guna do it for us.

Mhm. Now I’m done. Gnite.