I've been hacked
Well, not me, my webserver has been hacked. Yes, the one you're reading the blog on right now.
I'm not sure how they got in, but they're in. I have at least one rootkit installed and there is a casino link in the blogroll which I can't remove. This link leads me to the conclusion that the goal of the hack is to give someone link juice for SEO purposes. That's what I call black hat SEO!
First the website didn't respond. This had happened before, because port 80 was blocked and apache needed that. Last time I just used netstat to find the blocking app, killed it and restarted apache. This time, netstat threw a segmentation fault. Now standard linux tools NEVER throw segmentation faults. Upon googling I found this meant the possibility of having a rootkit installed. A rootkit is a collection of software that makes breaking into a system easier ONCE YOU'VE ALREADY BEEN IN. Meaning I was already hacked. The first time the site was down I had probably been hacked already.
This sucks. I could reformat the server and do all the security updates and never give out my password. But that's lame. I realized I don't want to be a server admin. The reason why I got an expensive webserver instead of a blog or a normal hosting account was that I was impressed by Tynan getting one, and wanting to be cool like him. I've since realized that a)Tynan has seen cooler days and b)managing your own webserver, while having it's benefits, is like the fucking plague. Even after setting up all the different configuration files on linux, getting apache to reroute to the correct virtual domains and shoving wordpress on there (easy part, I admit) I was paying 3x I would for a hosting account. And I don't even have a particularly good-looking blog. Or post that much. Or have any readers.
I'm thus quitting my contract with OLM.net. I don't need a webserver. The 'cloud' has advantages. You don't have to manage all that sysadmin stuff. They put on the security patches. They make sure your server isn't down. They split the costs among thousands. Yes, when the cloud (or your part of the cloud) goes down, you can't do anything about it. But I'm thinking that's a lot more unlikely than me being hacked (likelihood of 1). Also they will probably handle the whole affair more professionally than I ever could and would.
I just don't care enough for my own webserver to continue managing and paying for it. There was one instance where having my own webserver saved me a few hours, and I felt pretty 1337 ssh-ing into the server, but there is really no real use going on.
The blog is already imported on posterous, which is a great service. Posterous is a lot more practical than wordpress. It's free. It's better looking than my template. It's faster. People are working on it for me to make it even better. The development team is awesome: I've sent them several mails already and they're very helpful and responsive.
Having your own webserver is so 1.0! I just realized something about 2.0 I'd never thought about. You have backups everywhere. It's like a decentralized filesystem. If one part (computer, server, hard drive) goes down, it doesn't matter. You store your stuff all over the internet, have a few local backups with TimeMachine, half of your data is in some social networking or online content software anyway. If that's going down, the whole net is going down. And when the net is down, your data isn't going to help you anyway.
I recently was without my MacBook for about two weeks, and I didn't really miss it. Yes, it's a great machine and helps me do a lot. But was there anything essential I couldn't do? No. Mail is online. IM is online (meebo). All the resources I use are online anyway, I just had to download them to any computer I was using at the time. It may not have been a very productive phase, but it wasn't too bad either. I was quite productive in university, where they have lab computers.
Would I want to live without the Mac? No. It's beautiful, it's an entertaining center, it lets me do the two things I'm best at (writing and coding). I could technically write by hand, but I suck at that. So while being completely independent of a computer is nice, it's not for me yet. Maybe if all computers were as nice as Macs.
Bye, webserver.
@Hacker: you win. I hope you're happy about the link juice you got.
