NerdLog

I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long words Bother Me

I run a server which serves among other things xyz.com. Unfortunately doing this makes me an early target for every attack possible. Fortunately I don't run Windows so most attacks don't affect me. I do however have to worry about the few security issues that are found in FreeBSD. Until very recently I ran version 4.X.X as that had been good enough for many years, why change? To keep things secure I've been manually adding patches where I felt they were needed. Recently I decided to upgrade to the latest version of php5, to do so I would have had to do one of two things; a) hack php to not require getopt_long(), or b) hack libc to include getopt_long(). Unfortunately I chose "b". I built libc, I linked it into a few programs that needed getopt_long, invoked them. All was good in my world. What would you do next? Here's a hint,

cp libc.so.4 /usr/lib

is the wrong answer if you want your system to keep running. Unfortunately it's what I did. There's no recovery from this, short of booting into single-user and restoring the file. Unfortunately when you make use of a colo facility, single user mode is a luxury you don't get because the console is far away. I'd been building up a replacement box running FreeBSD 7.0 anyhow so I decided to accelerate the schedule on the new box so I could just schedule a quick run downtown and swap the two. I've always been an optimist, what was going to be a quick and easy swap required a dozen or so hours of clean-up. The bright side of things is that I can now do the standard FreeBSD cvsup, make world, make kernel, reboot and be immediately up-to-date.

I just had an epiphany... A blog is something you write in when your life is so boring you can take the time to write. This explains why most blogs (especially this one) are so boring, they talk about a period of complete boredom.