Trials of an Internet Host
Recently I had some trouble with the server where all of my websites are hosted. Business site, various blogs, there is lots of stuff on there, not to mention backups of work, email, and all sorts of things I do not really want to lose.
I first noticed the trouble when I couldn’t login through the command line. Strangely the websites were still running. I called the hosting company, and after talking with them for a while, managed to login as root. That was working. But it was acting quite odd. There were some errors in the /var/log/messages about ssh not being able to set uid 10003, the uid of my login, shull. I pondered. I thought. I sat circumspect.
I investigated for a while, and called up 1 & 1 again. I have a root server, but they’re not really supposed to support maintaining the machine itself. Then I got to thinking, I could spend hours diagnosing this, searching for a rootkit, but why not just jump on a new server. Cause things just don’t feel right with this situation as it is.
So that is what I did. I got on the phone with support later in the day, after talking for a while with the guy it at first sounded like it would cost a *LOT* more for a new server. But that was mostly because the names of server packages had changed quite a bit. The $100/mo one worked quite well. I asked how long it would take to setup. The guy was being really helpful, but then he just said the party line, 24-48 hours, he explained. I explained the urgency. But there wasn’t much he could do.
I got off the phone, and ordered right away. Checking a half hour later on my order status, what to my surprise, the server is setup already! I got down to work right away.
I switched over all nineteen domain names. This was easy enough since 1 & 1 handles them already. Then I went to Godaddy, the registrar, and configured the nameservers as 1 & 1 instructed.
Then I went back and started copying over all of the home directories. Most were small, so they copied over quickly. Even my own at 6G only took about 30 minutes. Both servers were on their own network, easy as pie! I then copied over the mysql databases for each of the dynmic sites, six plus blogs, a couple sugar crm instances, and two phplist email list management configs.
The great part was I had already localized everything for apache into one iheavy_sites.inc file. All I had to do was include that in the new server’s httpd.conf, edit some directory paths, and restart apache. There were a few little things here and there, but primarily that was it. After a few hours the domains started working, and I was so excited to see things really working.
The new server was PHP5 and MySQL5 and things just worked. This is just soooo good, I thought! I still had to get mail working. My good friend Jing went ahead and configured postfix & imap, as he is the email guru. Not long after ask (Active Spam Killer) was installed, and I moved my Maildir into place, and voila, I’m happily sifting through my mail on my Mac OS X Mail.app client!!
While I was at it I configured the new ftp backup system so files get automatically archived there. This is something I had been meaning to do for some time. And while I was on the Unix Sysadmin binge, I setup a few domains and Wordpress blog for a friend who has a dance company.
All told I was really only down 24 hours, and most of that time primarily email was out. The switch to the new server was so smooth, I barely got a headache from the whole affair. I guess this is bound to happen once every other year if you don’t patch your systems regularly.
And like clockwork, just yesturday I got an email from 1 & 1 saying they noticed some strange and illegal pinging and packet activity coming from the old server. Surprise surprise, it was compromised as I suspected. I explained to them the situation, and they blocked the relevant ports. That way I could leave the old server online for a little while longer, in case I need to get any other data off of there.
Thanks to Felix for some suggestions and advice, and thanks to Jing for email setup. We’re back!!
