Hi folks, sorry about the downtime. If you haven't already heard, the TIB server was hacked in to by a Brazilian cracker, who defaced all files on the web server beginning with "index" (which included php and wml files). Thanks to a quick SMS from monkeyson I shut the server down before any more damage could be done, but that's just the start of the troubles.

The short version goes like this:

• Sysadmin gets tonsillitis, unavailable for a week
• Big drive with all the web sites on won't mount, and data has to be recovered
• Backup server wasn't quite ready (onboard NIC didn't work under Linux, one of the hard drives was doing weird stuff)
• 13GB of data had to be copied on to the server over a 1Mb pipe, but was running at a mere 5KB/sec at one point (routing problems)
• Where full backups for sites weren't available, pages had to be recovered, remade, made up, or uploaded over by hand
• Then came the fun part of configuring the server and finding out why nothing worked, and write many programs to fix permissions, file extensions etc.
• Oh, and I had a fairly miserable holiday somewhere in between.

Anyway, hopefully this server is much more robust - the old server probably got hacked because I didn't pay enough attention to security patches, but as we're using some servers at work with the same OS I should get warnings as part of the day job. It's back in the Chichester office as London hasn't really worked out - same heat and power problems, but taking a week to go fetch the thing, fix it, then take it back. So, please, no Slashdotting or the boss will kill me! :)