Geekhack updates: WE ARE BACK

[harrison]

See, now Silat can take some lessons from Harrison on how to effectively get a point across without sounding like a whinebox. Constructive analysis of the situation. From my perspective, I imagine the people putting this back together have full-time jobs and families and other responsibilities that take a good portion of their time. So the work they put into this is purely from their passion for it. A few people have been slamming them for not repairing the situation to their personal satisfaction, and really, they have no business demanding anything.

I am quite certain they want the site up just as fast as you do, so be cool and let them do it.

Just my 2 cents.

I don't disagree, and I understand that getting GeekHack up and running isn't paying anyone's bills (quite the opposite at this point I'm guessing).

My point is that with no concrete or committed time frame, from my perspective (as a project and account manager) setting expectations is critical... and without a timeline I know first hand that it isn't an easy thing to do. That being said, setting NO expectation, or rather, not communicating at ALL isn't how you drive any project to success. Just look at Vortex on facebook... this situation isn't all that dissimilar.

Yes, we'll all be happy once the forum is back up, and over time people are going to come around... but the faith and confidence within the community will be lost, and it's going to take a LONG time to gain it back.

[rknize]

Just FYI, part of the reason we are being silent is because we are still dealing with attacks. Between that, hardware changes, and schedule constraints (day jobs), progress has been a little slow. Some work has been done in parallel at other sites, in the meantime.

[harrison]

Just FYI, part of the reason we are being silent is because we are still dealing with attacks. Between that, hardware changes, and schedule constraints (day jobs), progress has been a little slow. Some work has been done in parallel at other sites, in the meantime.

No offence... but that's complete bullshit. It doesn't take more than 15minutes to prepare and release an official statement via email using an external mailing service (for free) with the most basic of status updates regarding the forum. A simple DL with a no-reply might catch lots of spam filters, but it would be something, and it would have 0 risk to iMav, the servers, or his invested effort in rebuilding.

This should have occurred the day after the site went down, and again when it was determined that the forum was going to be rebuilt on a new platform, and that it'd take a few weeks before it was live again.

To have users private messaging and asking for updates on other forums and getting misinformation is unacceptable. Period. This has been a complete failure in community relations. Forget the technical issues at hand. GeekHack isn't just a "forum" anymore, and hadn't been long before I joined the community.

--edit--
Okay, I'm done beating this dead horse. It's clear to me that no 'official update' is going to occur a moment before the forum is live... I'll let it go.

[thegunner100]

I miss the VB emoticons.

[demik]

[thegunner100]

Here we go!

[rknize]

Harrison: thank you for your perspective. Please submit a bug report and it will be prioritized accordingly.

[ripster]

There are MANY Keyboard Forums around the globe ready to take up the slack.

Deskthority.net(International Audience)

Geekhack.org (Largest English Language Keyboard Forum)

HardForum.com Mice&keyboard subforum

KBDmania.net Korean community. NOTE: bandwidth is throttled outside Korea so PATIENCE is required with this one.

Likeyboard.net China - ANOTHER huge community and home of the KBC crew

Lowyat.net Mechanical Keyboard Thread (Malaysia)

OCAU Mechanical Keyboard Thread(Australia )

OTD.kr (Korea) Fantastic custom keyboards

Overclock.net Keyboard Subforum

Team Liquid Mechanical Keyboard Guide

VRForums Mechanical Keyboard Thread(Singapore)

Personally I like Deskthority.net for CONTENT (and FANTASTIC performance/virusfree uptime btw) and Reddit/MechanicalKeyboards for LINKS.

Just FYI, part of the reason we are being silent is because we are still dealing with attacks. Between that, hardware changes, and schedule constraints (day jobs), progress has been a little slow. Some work has been done in parallel at other sites, in the meantime

Uh oh.

Code: Select all

        _______  _______   __          _______                 
_______ \   _  \ \   _  \_/  |___  _  _\   _  \_______  _____  
\_  __ \/  /_\  \/  /_\  \   __\ \/ \/ /  /_\  \_  __ \/     \ 
 |  | \/\  \_/   \  \_/   \  |  \     /\  \_/   \  | \/  Y Y  \
 |__|    \_____  /\_____  /__|   \/\_/  \_____  /__|  |__|_|  /
               \/       \/                    \/            \/

[ddrhazy]

What's going on with the Race group buy? It's been about a week since iMav received the entire shipment.

[MagicMeatball]

What's going on with the Race group buy? It's been about a week since iMav received the entire shipment.

http://deskthority.net/geekhacker-refug ... tml#p63547

[Zehkul]

No offence... but that's complete bullshit. It doesn't take more than 15minutes to prepare and release an official statement via email using an external mailing service (for free) with the most basic of status updates regarding the forum.

Yeah, or creating a simple wordpress/blogger if you’re too scared to upload even a simple html. Rootworm cracking google? Lol!

To me it just looks like you don’t care how many users geekhack loses. Whatever. You’ve already demonstrated that you’re ignorant to common sense.

[aggiejy]

Harrison is dead on the money. The situation was handled poorly in hindsight regardless of anything else going on. It's not about entitlement or anything else, it's just common courtesy to inform frequent users of a site what happened if it's going to be offline for a significant time. (Which I should point out, STILL hasn't been done... posting here doesn't count except for the people that know to come here.) And also to harrison's point, the level of effort to do so is tiny... be it a static html page or an email, that defending doing nothing makes it worse.

BUT that said, I understand it's an all volunteer force and it's rude to complain. Thanks for working to get it back up regardless.

[rknize]

Fair enough. Here's the skinny:

Because we didn't know the extent of the damage to iMav's boxen, we purposely wanted to look defeated until someone could get to the DC. It seemed to work, as there were no more attacks until yesterday (which happens to coincide with the teaser page going up). Ironically, the teaser page isn't the target of the attacks. It's hosted elsewhere.

iMav was not able to go to the DC until last weekend. He spent most of it there doing clean installs. We took the time beforehand to try out various server configs (virtualization, etc) on our own to come up with how to manage the new sites. mkawa spent a lot of time doing code inspections of various forum implementations, as he mentioned, and we settled on SMF. We even considered non-PHP implementations. We also had an HD failure, which required $$$ and another visit to fix. There is also additional hardware on the way.

iMav's other site is already up on the new config and is working well, but it was never subject to these targeted attacks. There seems to be some obsession with the GH server.

More of us are traveling for work this week, so progress will probably be a bit slower. mkawa and others are helping with the new theme. Sorry this is taking so long, but we're doing our best. Thanks for your patience.

[didja]

Attempting to look defeated wasn't very hard because you were defeated. Completely. I feel bad for imav but some of the responses from the messengers have been reminiscent of the Iraqi minister of defense responses. http://politicalhumor.about.com/library ... nister.htm

Hopefully you guys can get things worked out. Personally I would cool it with the hardware purchases and go virtual. You're blowing cash on single points of failure when you could be using a virtual hosted solution with far better backup and recovery options including system snapshots on a regular basis and the ability to move the entire server to another host or different hardware quite easily.

[rknize]

Yes, we are going virtual.

Attempting to look defeated wasn't very hard because you were defeated.

My point was that we didn't want to waste time putting up a temporary site on compromised hardware when other nearby sites were also at risk.

[TexasFlood]

'Baghdad Bob', hah, hadn't thought about Mohammed in a while. He was funny, but he didn't know it.

I agree, it sounds kind of hollow to hear about "looking defeated" as if it wasn't the actual case. I'm not surprised the attacks would continue. I don't know why geekhack was targeted, or why NASA and various other sites were targeted, probably because they were large enough to be noticed and more than anything else, had vulnerabilities so "because they could". After geekhack was pwned, they're going to make it a point to exhibit continued pwnership (is that a word? hah) as long as they can.

I've seen the theory floated that they're after the domain name. Maybe, but seems like an unsupported theory since they're attacked other sites where there was really no hope of that, unless there was some proof I missed. Maybe a little paranoia which would be understandable in that situation, or maybe I just missed something.

Didja is right, virtualization is the way to go but not everyone reaches that conclusion at the same pace. If your virtual goes down you can put up a last known good image pretty quickly. Now that might not solve the whole problem since it would still most likely be vulnerable but it WOULD give you a system that you could do some remediation on.

When I've worked on compromised systems in the past the first thing we do is lock down access and restore then to a known good or virgin state and remediate as required. Then we open up a few ports for penetration testing and only to the public after passing those tests. I don't know what level of network controls are available with the current hosting services, of course virtualization can give you some extra controls there even if the hosting service doesn't, another reason to go that route.

[webwit]

Baghdad Bob: script kiddies removed attachments from backup drive.

[rknize]

It's probably more bragging rights than anything at this point. It's very interesting to witness, for sure.

[webwit]

Script kiddies. What they do is deface sites for bragging rights, or use your server to run hidden irc bots, or whatever. What they don't do is wipe drives. That's a whole other class of crime. Like the difference between putting a banner on someone's house saying "kilroy was here", and burning down such a property and then putting a banner on it. But ok, let's presume they did that. Then it will be interesting what comes of the police investigation. Did they have any contact with the Turkish police yet? Any arrests?

[dirge]

webwit, i can't understand why people climb mountains, interest meets challange I guess.

[TexasFlood]

Cyberlaw has a lot more teeth these days. Just access will get you in trouble now. In the old days that was just a slap on the hand and lucky for me. I understand forbidden fruit and the challenge to get to it just not destruction, that fortunately wasn't in my character. Even back in the day folks who destroyed data, such as federally funded research data as an arbitrary example, would get you led away in leg irons. Luckily I wasn't stupid or vandalistic to do that. But that's in country, not sure how it works between nations. The DMCA seems to have teeth where copyrighted material is involved but not sure about hacking.

[silat]

LOL the second quote was for Ripster. So try to keep up.
OK youngster Im giving up. You are so very defensive about GH and I do not want you to hurt yourself. Now please do not cry when anyone else asks about the downtime.

Try listening to yourself, kid. I haven't been defensive, just calling you out on your superior whining skills.

Kid? LOL if you were drafted in the 60's like me then you can call me kid. But we both know that you are the "kid" in this thread.
Have you noticed all the other posts questioning like I did?
Are they all going to be subjected to your whining about the "attacks and complaining"?

[MagicMeatball]

if you were drafted in the 60's like me then you can call me kid

Cool story, kid.

[Zehkul]

…

I know you have a lot of trouble, but that doesn’t excuse not doing the basics. Shutting down everything, sending out mails and redirecting geekhack.org to whatever you want. Doesn’t take long, doesn’t require working HDs.

My point was that we didn't want to waste time putting up a temporary site on compromised hardware when other nearby sites were also at risk.

So you decided to… let the site stay compromised so that you can be sure it is compromised and not try anything to change it, let alone taking it offline? Yes, I do not understand this. I’m very fine (and grateful) with you taking your time to sort this out, but I’m sick of ridiculous excuses.

What they don't do is wipe drives. That's a whole other class of crime. Like the difference between putting a banner on someone's house saying "kilroy was here", and burning down such a property and then putting a banner on it.

I don’t think you can easily compare this, since you normally expect there to be backups. It’s just another form of pissing off, hoping to extend the rollback or whatever. They probably went HOLY CR*P when they read that they had actually destroyed data.

[rknize]

I regret the news of your illness.

[ripster]

I like it when Geekhacker moderators troll harder than the members.

This July 17th thing isn't another is it?

Code: Select all

        _______  _______   __          _______                 
_______ \   _  \ \   _  \_/  |___  _  _\   _  \_______  _____  
\_  __ \/  /_\  \/  /_\  \   __\ \/ \/ /  /_\  \_  __ \/     \ 
 |  | \/\  \_/   \  \_/   \  |  \     /\  \_/   \  | \/  Y Y  \
 |__|    \_____  /\_____  /__|   \/\_/  \_____  /__|  |__|_|  /
               \/       \/                    \/            \/

[domoaligato]

+1 Zehkul & +1 Harrison

to add to this pointless rant of lessons learned...

repointing the dns name servers for your domain name back @ your registar prevents anyone from reaching your site.
how were you still monitoring attacks if this is actually impossible?
Were they attacking the web server via IP when the domain was re pointed to the registar? (nevermind this is also pointless because they should have bound the website in nginx to the dns domain name and not the IP "best practice")

if you had repointed the site to a placeholder page in the first place 2 weeks ago then you could have monitored attacks on the placeholder page.

This story keeps getting better and better...

[TexasFlood]

I'm wondering why repointing DNS would stop attacks like this. Surely they had the IP address?
Doesn't add up, pass the sniff test to me but guess it really doesn't matter.

[rknize]

They are attacking the IP.

[rknize]

I tried to explain things as best I could. I'm sorry if there are some who do not accept or otherwise do not like the choices that were made. What's done is done. Now that the machines are back under control, we'll try to be more forthcoming about our progress.

Thanks for your patience!