In which I’ve been totally busy all day! (This is a geek post; you can skip it if you’re not one.)

You know what’s awesome? Being busy at work! There’s an old web server here that’s been hacked (yes, totally pwn3d – and yes, we’re appropriately ashamed) and some clever little punk-ass geek is running a mail server on it and sending tons of spam.

Tons of spam. Which is slowing the box way down, and both mail and HTTP services are halting and crashing. Argh. The box is totally compromised.

Buzz has been engaged in a fairly active battle with our spamming friend all day. He’d take the mail server down, the hacker’d turn it back on. Root passwords have been changed, stuff’s been deleted, installed, moved… it’s a kind of chess-like warfare, really.

I’ve been moving content off the hacked box and onto another server as fast as I can. Some of the content I’ve moved and done DNS for included my employers’s own web site and several sub-domains. Getting those moved was exciting — pages didn’t come up, scripts didn’t work, PHP wasn’t turned on — but we managed it. Then it turns out the cgi-scripts still aren’t working, so I just spent the last hour messing with that but I still can’t get them to work and I have tons of sites left to move. We need to get the box turned off ASAP.

The day has whizzed by! I think I actually feel good about this whole working-for-a-living thing. *shudder*