brooknet.no-ip.com is offline

Hello - thanks for visiting my site.

brooknet.no-ip.com is currently offline for maintenance.

Latest news

(02:47 25-Oct-13): The server has not been cracked - Postfix's 'cleanup' ran out of memory and oom-killer killed everything. I did not detect any signs of intrusion and what I thought were bad login attempts turned out to be normal use of the Altair Micro ShellInABox system. I've disabled it, temporarily.

Old stuff

The server has been DOS'd, or rooted, or something - my stupid fault for not doing a package update for ages, and leaving the system wide-open. My guess is that someone thought that I'd make an easy target - they were right. :/

As to how this occurred - I was running ShellInABox with instructions on accessing my Altair Micro. A simple redirect sent users to a Screen process on another computer, and it connected to the Altair over Bluetooth. I think that someone found a vulnerability. No-one ever used this facility, and I've learned a lesson from this: the old days of friendly, welcoming Internet hosts are over! Modern times appear to be: knock another one down, go on to the next..

The previous disclaimer/excuse: "I expect that [the site] will be back in a few hours, but it might be longer - you never know, as it depends what I'm doing: it could be that some catastrophic computer fault has occurred, or perhaps the electricity meter's low on credit and I turned everything off to preserve the remaining electricity. Maybe I'm genuinely doing some maintenance, or I got fed up with hearing things whirring and buzzing. Whatever the reason, thanks for reading this notice."

In truth, the site might be down for days while I fix this mess; I may as well write (bad) poetry.

Can't sleep again
Just stopped to doze
Then, return to find
Everything hosed
Services down
And hope is in doubt
Unless I can sleep and
Sort my head out
(I did say that I'm a terrible poet).

If anyone would like to email me with commiserations - or just to tell me that I'm a shmuck - then the address is, phonetically: bravo romeo oscar oscar kilo november echo tango (at) india mike alpha papa (stop) charlie, charlie.

If there's any good news from this mess, it's that a) I have a recent backup and b) I forgot what 'b' is - did I mention that I'm tired? - so all is not lost. I apologise to folks who rely on this site for various ancient resources and I suggest that you look on Internet Archive's Wayback Machine for a copy of the site. In addition, Google's copy of the site is recent - try a search with the 'site' keyword, as in 'site:brooknet.no-ip.com'.

You should still be able to look at the camera - if not.. well, the PSU is a bit dodgy.

Thank you.

Lex

This notice was last updated at 02:50 on 25-Thu-13.
(In such a shaken and exhausted state was I, I didn't notice that I'd substituted the day for the month.)