Anatomy of Frustration
Last Friday I woke up and checked on Mission.net a Alumni site for Mormon Missionaries. As I was in the midst of bringing up the home page, I was redirected to a site that redirected to a site call k*g*e*b*a. As I shut down the webserver, and started to investigate, I found that every file that the webserver could access was bringing up this page. As I was formulating a plan to fix this problem, Xmission, the ISP where the host lives, physically pulled the plug. Through the weekend I laboured to find someone who could help me get this fixed.
I was finally able to find contact my contact Deseret Book and he got the host SSH access on Tuesday. As soon as I was able to access the box I ran the following sed script
grep -lR k*g*e*b*a {directories} | xargs sed -i.cmh -e ‘s/
< \/html>//g’
This removed the redirects that had been inserted into the files. The site was sitting pretty as far as having the infestation removed.
I then went to work upgrading the hosts, remotely, through two revisions (using there instructions) only to find all access to the outside had been blocked.
So I went to back to asking for access, asking for the ability to talk to the outside so that I could fix the problem. Every time I asked the ISP, I got rejected.
This is where the Frustration breaks in.
Then, today, I had an idea. I decided to work around the problem. I used what is called ssh port forwarding and I would now I’m using my DSL connection to upgrade the host
First, I created two remote SSH connections, then I used netcat to encapsulate dns traffic.
I’d go into more detail, but since most of the one readers of this blog aren’t tech nerds, I’ll spare ya’ll.
If you want to know the nitty gritty commands and what I did to get it let me know in the comments and I’ll add them to the post.
Cuz I am tired and all.
Well, you can send me the commands in private, but I just want to publicly say thanks. Your other readers don’t realize it, but you are what keeps mission.net running, and we’d be lost without you. Kudos.
(P.S. I’m still wondering if the XMission folks didn’t somehow create this problem to begin with, possibly opening the security around mission.net to allow the cracking, whether intentionally or unintentionally.)
Well, this goes to show why I admire you. This post means nothing to me, not because I don’t care, but because I don’t understand almost anything you just posted. I am glad you are on the job for mission.net. It would be a shame if we lost that resource.
Ditto…. we can’t thank you enough for the countless hours you’ve put in (and continue to provide) for mission.net.
Domo Arigato Gozaimasu! You are a brilliant techie doing an amazing job of keeping things going. I and hundreds of other webmasters on mission.net do appreciate your willingness to serve. Simple words are not enough to express this appreciation.