2008/8/1 Aaron Griffin <aaronmgriffin@gmail.com>:
What follows below is a recounting of the Great Gerolde Breakage of '08. Details are provided by eyewitness accounts, and names have been changed to protect the innocent.
It was a dark and gloomy night, that Thursday. I had come home late, in a bit of a dour mood, and had been drinking a bit. I sat down at my computer to check some emails and do some things before bed. When I concluded my events for the night, I decided it was time to -Syu and reboot. So I closed everything down except one terminal. The events below were all internal monologue:
Hmm, Syu time. Woah, that's a lot of packages.... ah well. ENTER Huh, why do I have apache on this laptop? I'll have to remove that later. Hmm... mailman? I KNOW I didn't install that... what the? OH MY GOD THIS IS GEROLDE!
I immediately Ctrl-C'd because I had a "sudo reboot" queued up for when the -Syu finished. I paused for a moment, kicking myself for doing that. I checked apache, and it was still running. ftp was working too.
Ok, good. Exit SSH. Let me -Syu locally.
Re-ssh to gerolde... immediate "permission denied". Oh god. Oh god. Oh god.
Yeah, I Ctrl-C'd before a kerberos upgrade was finished. This broke ssh, and something else goofy broke mailman.
I emailed Dale, and he fixed SSH in the morning (whew, thanks a lot Dale). Mailman was a bit harder, but considering everything was down already, we switched from exim to postfix, as we'd been talking about it for ages. Hooray for silver linings!
So. It's all back up now. Mailman is working, postfix is working, and everything else should be in working order. If something is broken, please let me know.
Sorry for the inconvenience.
Gerolde, hacked by phrak
Well written and all but I seriously think we should forward this to Skoal for some bardification. =) Well done! Now you can get the hacked by phrak t-shirt! Dusty