A very bad day at Avsim and a bad day for us all.

[Carlo]

Wow

[Anuj]

This is very Sad, I hope Avsim recovers soon.

[Ali Abou-Zeid]

Some hope remains!!!

http://linux.myalbemarle.org/forums/vie ... f=32&t=352

[caps1237]

Ali what does it say? ...for those of us not registered.

[NWADC9]

Ali what does it say? ...for those of us not registered.

They made it members only?!?

A copy of the post from another forum:

As you are aware, we had our technical person at the Network Operating Center most of yesterday.

TOPOLOGY:

GREEN Server: Library and Email Server
PURPLE Server: Web Site and Forum server
White Server: Oflfline and powered down standby server
NAS: Network Accessible Servers connected to PURPLE

SUMMARY:
Ran mirror image of GREEN. Twenty one gigs of data mirrored.
Ran mirror image of PURPLE. No mirror created (see below).

Using Acronis Partition recovery tool:
Ran partition recovery on GREEN. All but two partitions recovered (/root and /home)
Ran partition reconvery on PURPLE. No partitions recovered.

Checked NAS; all disks shown as good and operating. Unable to determine if data is corrupted at this time.

DISCUSSION:

As can be seen from the results on PURPLE, we can confirm that PURPLE was hacked into oblivion. The disk appears to have been wiped. We will be removing the disk and sending it out for forensic analysis with the intent to recover the log files and any other traces of the individual or individuals who did this and to recover as much data as possible.

GREEN appears to have suffered the same attack, but because of a bad sector, the hacker could not get beyond that point to do a complete wipe of the disk. In other words, data exists there to recover and determine whether there are finger prints to track.

NAS disks are working fine, but have we were not been able to determine yesterday whether data integrity is there. Will determine that later this week.

White has been brought back online and reformatted with new OS.

All systems remain unplugged from the net pending reconstruction and security / configuration / and backup strategy implementation.

Okay, now what does all that mean? Well, it means we are not dead in the water. At least not yet. We were definitly sabotaged and we are looking to recover footprints on all of the servers and disks that we have at our disposal to provide the facts to substantiate legal actions being taken against the perpetrator(s). More importantly, we want to recover all the data on PURPLE to put back in place the forum as it existed at 2145 on 13 May. We may be able to recover that data from other locals in our NAS and PURPLE however, and we are investigating that.

We are pretty confident that we will be able to retrieve and rebuild the library. We are still working that.

How are your contributions to AVSIM helping us get to being back online?

We have brought a second, AVSIM experienced, technical support person into the mix. John Binner. We will be flying John up to work with Stan. John will principly be involved in the hardware side of the recovery / rebuild aspect of this effort.

Second, we are pricing out a variety of new hardware and replacement disks for the existing GREEN and PURPLE servers. We are looking at a BLADE SERVER array as our primary system for the new topology at AVSIM. The contributions by the community allow us to consider this technology and in doing so, it enables us to implement capability that we could not have had on the existing PURPLE/GREEN hardware. It will then allow us to use those two older servers for a variety of things, including mirroring and daily back ups OFF the NET and isolated by some pretty serious impediments to further hacking.

In short, your contributions to the AVSIM recovery are already being put to use in bringing this community back on line and on its feet. Thank you again for your support and understanding.

_________________
Tom Allensworth
AVSIM Online

[sanins192]

It was working for me earlier and I am not a member. Now it is blocking me. I didn't read all of it but it said something about one drive was completely erased, and it is being sent off to see if data can be recovered, and I didn't read much after that. (sorry)

[FJ flyer]

I'm a member there and if anyone wants to use my account to have a look around, contact me privately.

[RatherBFlyin]

Does anyone else find it mildly ironic that a bad disk sector helped prevent the entire server from being wiped out?

[Northwestdc9]

Does anyone else find it mildly ironic that a bad disk sector helped prevent the entire server from being wiped out?

Hahahaha, way funnier to people who understand computers!

So far it looks like very good news and the hints at purchasing a new Blade array are excellent news, Blade servers would be an ENORMOUS improvement and with the correct coding could make Avsim FAR better than before.

[NWADC9]

We placed the order for the hardware this morning. We ordered some significantly powerful machines. These systems will be delivered Thursday night in time for our tech team to install them on Friday, the 22nd.

HARDWARE:

Due to the generosity of hundreds of community members, we will be able to bring online sometime over the weekend an AVSIM System that all of us will be proud of, I am sure.

High on our list of attributes that these new systems will provide are:

Virtualization
Clustering
Load Leveling
We will be effectively running the equivalent of 20 servers in two boxes.

In addition, we have purchased a 3Com 5500G 1 Gigabit 24 port switch to replace the existing 3C router.

I don’t want to bore you with the details, but here is the inventory of systems that will be brought back online Saturday or Sunday:

• Two HP Proliant DL380 G5’s with quad core Xeon E5450 processors working at 3 GHz.
• 32 GIG of DR2 Ram per G5
• 1.2 terabytes of storage on each G5 using 4 x 300 GB SATA-300/SAS drives.
• In addition, we will be bring back online, or repairing to bring online, our existing three severs, GREEN, PURPLE and WHITE
• We will also bring our NAS back into operation as our primary storage device for the system array.

SYSTEM SOFTWARE AND FUNCTIONALITY:

I am going to put my neck on the line here a bit based upon a briefing I received today, and say that our confidence is building about the state of the library. It is my hope that we can have our legacy library back up and running on Sunday. Our email system would also be back in operation.

We will have a Web site back and operating sometime over the weekend. If we can get the old system up and running, great. If not, we’ll create a redirect page for all three domains back to this forum system. In the meantime, the design team continues to work on the web and library redesigns and we will bring them online as soon as the team gives us the go ahead.

As for the Forums system; our confidence is increasing in that there may be something retrievable there. Again, we won’t know until we can inspect the material that we have since recovered and placed on WHITE for storage. More on that later.

http://linux.myalbemarle.org/forums/vie ... f=32&t=419

[Ali Abou-Zeid]

Awesome!!!

After that, I'd try to work on finding who on earth did that and why!!!

[caps1237]

Wooooo!!! Awesome, glad everything seems to be working out. In the long run...this is what, 2 or 3 weeks of no AVSIM to trade the old one for a new, bigger and improved AVSIM with a larger budget. And a greater appreciation for what they do for us. Definitely a good deal in my opinion, and almost a semi-blessing in disguise.

[FJ flyer]

YAY! I didn't think it'd turn out this well!

[deadman3108]

So wait...once the new servers get online, will old files be able to be reached or is it a start from scratch process?

Reason why I ask is because some add on features are hosted by Avsim, such as FiftyNorth website with repaints and what not.

[NWADC9]

From what I understand, it'll be like nothing happened.

[Jacob Mobley]

From what I understand, it'll be like nothing happened.

Yes! that's great, I really like this website for it's massive download library. All if my freeware's are from avsim.

[Anuj]

Yay!!! Great News !!

[Dennis]

Excellent...I bet VAs everywhere must be celebrating.

[alma343]

''Celebrate good Times common!''

[NWADC9]

They're baaaaaaaaaaaaaaack...

http://www.avsim.com/

Well, sorta. No library yet. But at least you can go to Avsim.com and actually see something