History behind this new website
This machine recently (July '04) got hacked into with a RootKit via the ikonboard forum pages by a front calling itself 'The Brazilian Rebellios Brothers'. The machine was secured well and the break in was sophisticated, presumingly through a php vulnerability.
At the same time numerous DoS attacks were coming from dreambabes.com and other ipaddress es(often tracing back to japan for some reason). This was only a few months after Dr Cooper from the TV show summoned Harry to federal court for using "Harry's Practice". Dr Cooper's tv show was coming to an end with only a token skit on 'Homes & Gardens' for him to continue, and as a new career direction he opened a commerce website slightly after (September). The court case was an attempt to obtain the domain name from Harry, but it never eventuated. While there is no proof to connect the two events, the coincidence is there and this behaviour is common place for unethical competitors. It is known that you can pay money to have virus infected computers around the world launch DoS attacks against your competitors.
Fortunately the break in gave me an opportunity to revamp the machine:
- Upgrading the machine from an aging
Red Hat 7 to an Hardened Gentoo installation. Gentoo is what I use at home and at work so everything is much easier to administer now.
- Zencart is now the website front. Zencart is a fork from OsEcommerce and while I disapprove of forking projects, Zencart gives a needed professionalism in appearance over OsEcommerce.
- Ikonboard was replaced with PhpBB. PhpBB has good integration with Zencart.
- Email POP service was replaced with an secure IMAP service with a webmail interface called SquirrelMail
- Virtual hosting with Apache2. This allows the hosting of all the different websites on the one machine.
- Gnutella runs helping people across the world to share. Nothing is actually shared from the machine, but by providing a permanent gnutella ultrapeer others can search for the things that they want quicker and can be more generous as sharing participants to the information age.
All this took less than a week and steering clear of redhat's package management (rpm) is a godsend, so in hindsight it was all a blessing in disguise. But try telling that to Tanja ;)
Later on I hope to work on adding an ldap directory service to compliment the IMAP server.
