A September we'll remember

Related Link: http://paul.merton.ox.ac.uk/ascii/smileys.html

September was a very trying month. I won't recap the events of the terrorist attacks in the US as this has been done countless times and with much more eloquence than I could ever muster. My sincerest wishes go out to all those effected by this tragedy, from the families and friends of victims to those like myself who, although not directly effected, feel this event will scar mankind for as long as we will remember.

On the local front we've had the Ansett collapse and the Tampa refugee issue.Both issues that have united some Australians and torn others apart.

And at Byte Services we had our fair share of issues last month. Problems with both our major carriers (Telstra and Optus), the attack of the Nimda worm, and a client mistakenly deleting their entire website.

I won't go into the issues with our carriers as that forms part of a bigger issue we are investigating.

The Nimda worm issue was an exciting few days. As most of you know, Byte Services run most of our services on Apple Macintosh hardware. There are many reasons for this, such as ease of set up, low cost of maintenance, and the sorts of services we can offer on this platform. But a major issue is security. Like the US Army we realised that many of the other server platforms were extremely vulnerable to attacks from malicious netizens of cyberspace.

Unfortunately, there are some areas where we are forced to use the more vulnerable platforms. We have one server running NT 4.0 in our server farm. And it performs one function: it is our proxy server. It was this machine that was infected with the Nimda worm in mid September.

Fortunately it immediately recognised the infection and removed itself from the network. Unfortunately this left some of our services disabled, and others extremely slow. Several rebuilds (NT can be very tricky) and as many late nights, and we're back up and running at full steam. And we have a whole slew of new patches and virus identifiers added to the system. So we're safe..... until the next one :).

And finally we have the deleted website incident. Our servers are extremely secure, but no matter how secure your site is, if you give the keys to the wrong person, things can go wrong. In this case, a contractor who had been granted FTP access to the site deleted the entire content of the website. Not just the old website, but also a work in progress that is to form the customers new site. Restoration from a backup and unerasing files took 4 days of constant work from two of our staff members.

So all in all, September wasn't our best month. We learnt some valuable lessons and got to stay up really late both crying in front of the TV and swearing at the Microsoft programming team. Let's hope October is a bit brighter on all accounts.