Dara and I have been having to conduct critical unscheduled maintenance of our mail server today. This was precipitated by getting a voice mail from Comcast this morning asking us to call them, and noting a risk of possible cessation of our service. I went “WUT?” and called them, and was informed they’d noticed one of our machines carrying out DDoSes.
To which Dara and I both went “WUT?!” And after we thanked Comcast for the heads up, Dara moved forward with completely flattening the box so we could do a brand new clean install with the latest version of Debian Linux. (We were going to do some dist upgrades anyway over this forthcoming winter holiday, but this just escalated the priority.)
And we went down to Frys this afternoon to get a new hard drive and power supply too, since the box was down anyway. We’re both rather impressed that the hard drives previously in newmoon had dated back to 2004 (whoa) and 1998 (WHOA!). And we’ve brought home a new drive that’s acres more space than we had on newmoon before, not to mention much quieter. So the server room should have a significant reduction in noise now.
BUT. This also means we’ve had the server out all day, and it should be down probably for the rest of the evening. Hopefully it’ll be back up by tomorrow, but operating system upgrades can be dicey. So don’t be terribly surprised if we’re not up tomorrow morning.
ALSO: this impacts only our mail server. So the mailing lists we host (notably the LexFA list and the Filk list) are down, and users who have mail accounts on our system won’t be able to use those accounts till newmoon is back up. Web services are unaffected.
Please let Dara and me know if you have any questions, and watch her and my accounts for further updates!
