I just learned that a great web resource, Old-Computers.com, is gone. Apparently, this already happened in December. There have been efforts to restore the site. E.g, there’s a “Partial offline backup old-computers.com (2008)” on archive.org:
oh, that’s a downer. But no blame on the admins, I can see how it could become overwhelming, whether to keep up with attacks or whether to try to upgrade the software.
I saw a couple people offering to host it on non-Windows hosts, but I imagine there would be code translation involved (and perhaps database porting), since the original site was written in Microsoft ASP, using SQL Server.
If it’s SQL based, the attacks were probably injections, which also means thorough laundering of what’s left of the database and consolidating a meaningful state from backups and last states. (Not fun. – I’ve only seen what such an attack does to PHP and JS files, (repeatedly) spreading on a shared host, but I don’t want to even think of what this may do to the infected db. It’s probably not too nice.)
Once again Ed, thank you for the wonderful service you do here. Not just keeping the lights on and dusting the cobwebs, but your light touch moderation as well - it’s very much appreciated!
The situation here is that the site software takes regular backups (every two days); one of the mod team keeps an offsite copy of the latest backup(s) and another of the mod team takes an offsite copy every month or so.
Also, there is some coverage of this site’s content at the Internet Archive - perhaps with a concerted effort of (rate-limited!) requests someone could improve that substantially. We have approx 2300 topics, and the IA has over 2300 captures, but the captures are paginated and I’m sure some topics or pages of topics will be missing as will be some of the latest comments to topics. Presently Wayback Machine sees a javascript-free paginated version of the site, for example like this.
I noticed that some time ago. I wonder why would someone hack an information database. Except for money but who would pay a large amount for a non-commercial site?
Meanwhile there’s a new 2009 backup (I wonder who need that non-searchable 3GB file?)
There often isn’t any why to it. There are millions of processes trying to run scripts on random hosts, perhaps to insert a spam link comment that might earn someone somewhere a millionth of a cent click bonus. Some of these scripts are run by bad actors. Some of them are run by bored script kiddies. Statistically, some of them must be running as forgotten programs on zombie hosts.
I watched a tiny niche MediaWiki instance I used to run crumple and rot over time. After I ceased being interested in the content, various scripts would find the old database server a few thousand times a day and add their database rows of spam, or even dump spam into the server logs in the hope that someone would click the link. Once the database tables got full (with 99.999% spam content) the PHP front-end couldn’t serve anything. Didn’t stop the spam scripts from trying to access the database. I eventually blew it all away and resolved never to attempt to have nice things online again.
The natural state of a server is down. Like RIFA caps, Varta batteries and how all bleeding stops eventually, it’s inevitable.
