All clear

[prog]

queue got famous on lj_nifty for writing a Perl script that mass-resets the security levels of one's past posts. It quickly got so popular that jmac.org became well and truly slashdotted within hours, bogged down so much that an ssh login took about 5 minutes to accomplish. Problem "solved" by shutting down the webserver and renaming the scripts for the time being.

I sent q both my congratulations on creating a runaway success, and a brief code-critique towards making version 2.0 not run away quite so far.

I got all paranoid about the box getting cracked again and let some of this concern leak at q, but according to John@Arcus, all is well. (Except for the fact that I'm still running Debian-unstable. Sigh.) So I am relieved and a little embarrassed.

Comments

jinxed!

[(Anonymous)]

Jason,

For including me in the blog saying 'all is well', I chide you. You have jinxed me. Now, I am totally and utterly destined to have a security problem within the next 1 - 10 days. It'll happen. Unless I go totally paranoid.

I know, I'll just unplug the ethernet to all the boxes on the same subnet as mine! That's it. [but that wouldn't do any good, although it'd make me feel like I got some revenge ;]

You must be cautious in taunting the linux security pixies, for they will come after you and r00t you so fast you won't know what hit you.

d00d - 1 pwn3d j00!

*runs apt-get update and prays*

j@arcus

hardly felt it

[jtroutman.livejournal.com]

We barefly felt the bandwidth difference used -- was that file on a dynamicly generated page, perhaps? The server fell over far before running out of bandwidth.

is that the best slashdotting type effect you can muster? Bah!

;-)

Re: hardly felt it

[prog.livejournal.com]

No, I think the boggage was the result of the program being too inefficient for heavy use, not because the machine was being hit a lot. Q used the WWW::Mechanize module to abstractly screen-scrape LiveJournal (which is interesting, as I'd never heard of that mofule and will have to check it out now), but probably should have used LWP to speak directly to the LJ server instead, through its own (HTTP-based) protocol. We'll see how well version 2.0 fares. :)