directories – Tech Today w/ Ken May

GitLab.com Melts Down After Wrong Directory Deleted, Backups Fail

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Source-code hub Gitlab.com is in meltdown after experiencing data loss as a result of what it has suddenly discovered are ineffectual backups. On Tuesday evening, Pacific Time, the startup issued the sobering series of tweets, starting with “We are performing emergency database maintenance, GitLab.com will be taken offline” and ending with “We accidentally deleted production data and might have to restore from backup. Google Doc with live notes [link].” Behind the scenes, a tired sysadmin, working late at night in the Netherlands, had accidentally deleted a directory on the wrong server during a frustrating database replication process: he wiped a folder containing 300GB of live production data that was due to be replicated. Just 4.5GB remained by the time he canceled the rm -rf command. The last potentially viable backup was taken six hours beforehand. That Google Doc mentioned in the last tweet notes: “This incident affected the database (including issues and merge requests) but not the git repos (repositories and wikis).” So some solace there for users because not all is lost. But the document concludes with the following: “So in other words, out of 5 backup/replication techniques deployed none are working reliably or set up in the first place.” At the time of writing, GitLab says it has no estimated restore time but is working to restore from a staging server that may be “without webhooks” but is “the only available snapshot.” That source is six hours old, so there will be some data loss. Read more of this story at Slashdot.

See original article:
GitLab.com Melts Down After Wrong Directory Deleted, Backups Fail

Malicious computers caught snooping on Tor-anonymized Dark Web sites

Enlarge / A map of hidden services directories detected as malicious. The trust of the Tor anonymity network is in many cases only as strong as the individual volunteers whose computers form its building blocks. On Friday, researchers said they found at least 110 such machines actively snooping on Dark Web sites that use Tor to mask their operators’ identities. All of the 110 malicious relays were designated as hidden services directories, which store information that end users need to reach the “.onion” addresses that rely on Tor for anonymity. Over a 72-day period that started on February 12, computer scientists at Northeastern University tracked the rogue machines using honeypot .onion addresses they dubbed “honions.” The honions operated like normal hidden services, but their addresses were kept confidential. By tracking the traffic sent to the honions, the researchers were able to identify directories that were behaving in a manner that’s well outside of Tor rules. “Such snooping allows [the malicious directories] to index the hidden services, also visit them, and attack them,” Guevara Noubir, a professor in Northeastern University’s College of Computer and Information Science, wrote in an e-mail. “Some of them tried to attack the hidden services (websites using hidden services) through a variety of means including SQL Injection , Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) , user enumeration, server load/performance, etc.” Read 7 remaining paragraphs | Comments

Visit link:
Malicious computers caught snooping on Tor-anonymized Dark Web sites

How to Migrate From an Old NAS to a New One Overnight with rsync

A NAS, or network-attached storage device, is great for storing files you can reach from any computer in the house. But when you upgrade to a new one, you’re stuck copying everything over by hand, swapping drives, and risking data loss. Here’s a much more reliable method. Read more…