neurotwitch

i am so bummed out

Today, well, yesterday, was one of those days where you’re ahead of the game if you just don’t get out of bed.

I was a little tired because I’d been up very late the night before trying to deal with connecting via ftp to a client’s site on a ValueWeb server so I could do some updates. But the server crashed and somehow I’ve been locked out. I wrote to ValueWeb before I called it a night.

When I came downstairs this morning, I was all set to tackle the ValueWeb problem since I assumed I would have email from them, and then get started on finishing up the last bits and pieces of a humongo site that’s just about ready to launch, and troubleshoot a site that’s displaying a little weird in Firefox. Stanley had gotten back from his echo cardiogram (to check out his heart murmur) and, as soon as I walked into the office, he said, “the server is down again.”

Boy was it ever. Our webserver provider, Netsonic, told us that the kernel was toast, the later told us we’d been hacked and that’s what wrecked stuff. Our server was down almost all day, and they had to restore things from the last good daily backup, which was the January 4th backup. Which sucks, because we lost data and email stored on the server (and I lost two posts I like a lot and will recreate one of these days), but better a day’s worth of data than everything.

This is costing us hundreds of dollars to resolve, and it will be several hours before it’s completely resolved. The main problem, the entryway or what have you, has been fixed (at least for this method of gaining entry for hacking). Using a password that is the same as the user name is an incredibly stupid thing to do—the equivalent of handing out your card and the pin number, and this was done by people who should know better. Maybe the guys at Netsonic can tell us how to disallow this kind of username/password combo at the server level. They’re pretty sharp, and are putting what they can into place. (Oh I how I miss the spam filter!)

So we lost a day dealing with this—it was hard to concentrate on anything but dealing with this. To top it off, ValueWeb has not been able to solve the connection problem—I called, spent 30 minutes doing this and that, and basically was told that it would magically resolve itself in six hours when the server purged its hashes or some such crap like that. Didn’t happen—so it was a waste of time. Maybe it’ll get solved some time this month.

The only good thing in all this is I just discovered that Google cached my lost entries—happy happy joy joy. So I guess I’ll get those back up now. This year hasn’t been a very good start for us—the server frying, health, and a couple of other things. Maybe we’re just getting all the bad stuff over with early. Hah.

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