www.oarcorp.com is dead for a week ???

[joel at OARcorp.com (joel at OARcorp.com)]

On Sun, 2 May 1999, Rosimildo DaSilva wrote:

> Am I the only one, or www.oarcorp.com is dead for about a week ?

Just to let everyone know, oarcorp.com has been through a series of
upgrades/problems that were largely a sequence of unrelated events.  

The first problem occurred in the first half of April.  We noticed that we
were being attacked by a hacker.  The attack matched the pattern of "scan
attacks" reported by CERT where a range of IP addresses is scanned for
known security problems.

That required a couple of days offline to figure out if any damage had
been done and to upgrade the server to close all known security problems.
There was the usual bout of upgrade misconfiguration problems and it was
about 1 week before this was settled out enough to clear the mail backlog.
The worst problem was that our DNS entry was incorrectly reporting the
wrong IP address for a period of time.

Independently of that, we had scheduled a major network upgrade to better
isolate our internal network from the outside world.  This started about 4
work days after the server was back online.  This network upgrade is why
you can no longer do a traceroute to or ping www.oarcorp.com. 

Unfortunately, once things were stable from this, the DNS misconfiguration
error came back again as it had propagated to our ISP and their DNS server
was giving the bad DNS entry for oarcorp.com. :(

And on top of all that, some time last Sunday, we lost power and the
server was down from sometime in the night until Monday morning.

As far as I can tell, most of the major problems are resolved now.  Mail
is flowing well again.

The only problem I know of is one Ralf mentioned last night.  Reverse arp
is not working as required by socks-ified clients.   Is anyone else having
problems?  

--joel
Joel Sherrill                    Director of Research & Development
joel at OARcorp.com                 On-Line Applications Research
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