The Habitrail

Okay, so my webpage is working again.

I was very happy when I finally got my files back.

I have now made my machine secure again, as far as I know, so no more hacking attempts… I hope.

Now, I can actually attempt to get the printer working… remember the printer? The thing that started this week-long mess?

So, yesterday I was able to recover three of the four partitions from the old hard drive. Of course, the data I need is on the fourth partition.

I spend most of yesterday trying to figure out some way of automating the process of trying every single partition boundary, then checking if a legitamate filesystem starts there… and I think I thought of one right before I went to sleep, but I don’t want to think about it any more, so I go to bed.

This morning, Luke knocks on my door to tell me that Ken had to shut down my machine because it was hosing the network. (Luckily, he just disconnected it, not turned it off.)

Long story short… I got hacked.

The bastard hacked root access, used my machine to DoS other machines (which was sucking up our bandwidth) and then cleaned his tracks. Turns out there’s this nice little program out there on the dark side of the Internet that allows any script kiddie to do this quickly and easily, and all they have to do it point it at a machine.

You see, because I’ve been reinstalling Linux so many times, I’ve forgotten to close certain ports… and paid for it.

I just want things to work again. I literally broke down and cried last night. I just can’t let it be. I can’t go out and enjoy myself, because I know that this problem is still there waiting for me.

Oh, and it goes without saying that if I ever find out who you are, you bastard, I’ll kill you.

(Kick a man while he’s down… what a miserable excuse for a human being.)

Remember when I was saying how my Linux machine keeps getting worse? I’d fix one problem and another one would surface, more severe than the previous? Well, the last problem had required the reinstallation of the entire operating system, so I thought it was downhill from there.

I was wrong.

I took the precaution of turning off the 3GB hard drive in the BIOS (which is the hard drive which contained all of the important data on Habitrail), which in retrospect I should have physically disconnected and powered off just to be sure. So I finally got one of the network cards working (or so I thought, turns out it’s still not routing or something) so I figured the time had come to move the old data onto the new drives.

I then discover, after re-enabling the hard drive, that I’ve somehow managed to wipe the partition table on it.

ARGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH.

Technically, this is a recoverable error. I’ve backed up the entire hard drive into two big files, so that I can always step back to this moment in time. Now, I just have to see if I can remember what the partitions were… ARGH.

So last night I tried once again to get my machine working… made some very stupid mistakes (i.e. forgetting the computers start counting at 0, not 1) and managed to wipe out the entire contents of my 20GB hard drive… which contained (if you remember) my entire MP3 collection. The bright side of this is that it forces me to reencode all of my CDs again, this time I can even turn on error correction, thus saving me the task of having to listen to all of my MP3s to determine which ones had blips and skips in them, a project which I had completely ignored for a long time.

After fixing the mistake though, I managed to get the Linux machine booting with the new install of RedHat… and lo and behold… the network cards aren’t working. It’s just one thing after another. To recap:

• I want to get Microsoft Networking working for all the computers, and have Habitrail be the central file and printer repository, so I
• Try to install Samba, which seems to work, but I can’t get working because the printer isn’t working, so I
• Play with the machine for quite a bit before I realize that I didn’t compile parallel port support into the kernel, so I
• Configure and compile a new kernel, which doesn’t work because of some issues with modules, so I
• Continue tweaking the kernel, and eventually give up and try to install a clean install of RedHat, so I
• Physically switch the two hard drives, so the /dev/hda will be the blank 30GB drive, which doesn’t install because one of the other partitions wasn’t unmounted properly, so I
• Flounder for a while trying to figure out which drive it is, but eventually find it, and reinstall RedHat, which after an hour decides not to boot at all, so I
• Try to boot off of a boot disk, which doesn’t work, so I
• Try to figure out why the disk isn’t booting, it turns out to be a bad floppy drive, so I
• Borrow a floppy drive from Luke and swap it out; it works, so I boot and fix the file system and install RedHat, but make the stupid mistake described above, so I
• Spend two hours trying to figure out why the computer is booting form the wrong (i.e. the old) hard drive, where it turns out because I inadvertently told it to. (HDD1 is the second Hard drive, not the first), so I
• Switch it to HDD0 and boot, and it boots, but doesn’t recognize one of the network cards for some reason, so I
• Try to just get one of them working, but neither works, so I
• Go to bed.

And that’s what I’ve been doing in all my free time since Sunday night. I have made zero forward progress, unless you count upgrading from a working RedHat 6.2 install to a not-working RedHat 7.0 install and wiping out my MP3s progress.

In the meantime, July 1st is rapidly approaching, and I really really really should be spending my time packing and moving the remaining stuff out of my old apartment. And as Anime Expo approaches, I’m going to have less and less free time. I think I’m going to designate this weekend as a “All moving, nothing but moving” weekend, and get it all done. No fun for me on Saturday and Sunday.