So here it is, 8.30pm, and I'm restoring a Cobalt Raq 4 to something approaching virginity. It belongs toa colo'd customer, and it got cracked; we offered, for a modest cost, to restore it, and here I am.

It's Linux under the hood of course -- Red Hat, or at least they use RPM --and it's interesting to see what's been done with it. The management page is pretty slick, though it always leaves me wanting to log on. To do that, I need to telnet -- shudder -- and of course the cust. hasn't got SSH on it. (Confirmation that we had a cracker was nmap showing lots of open ports that responded with an SSH banner. Seems weird to me that a cracker would install ssh, but oh well.) But all the web functionality seems to be there, and it seems pretty and easy to use.

The cust. kept up to date with the patches from Sun (part of what I'm reinstalling right nww), but Ithink there's still a few holes; I'm pretty sure there's an old version of Apache, for instance. And would it kill them to have OpenSSH? Or firewalling tools?

Anyhow, it's the first time I've worked with an automatic patch installer that wasn't Windows, and I must admit I'm impressed. Download the patch -- which is a tarball of script + rpms + patches -- clicky-click install on the web interface, and away you go. I'm sure it's not news for most of you, but it's neat for me. The only thing is that it reboots between a lot of them -- c'mon guys, I thought this was Linux! :-)

Random idea for a program: I'm hooked up to this thing by a crossover cable to another Linux box, just to keep it off the 'net while it's having everything reinstalled. I telnet in occasionally to make sure things are working, but the damn prompt always takes so long to come up. It's the Raq doing a reverse lookup on my DNS, of course, but because it's just on an Xover cable it sits there until the queries time out. We're talking a minute or so to time out, which is unacceptable. I'm an important man, after all.

So my idea is to have a program listening for queries like that and answering them, masquerading as whatever DNS server the query was directed at. Basically, just fake 'em out with whatever info they want. In cases like this (which I can see coming up, oh, at least once a year), it'd speed things up immensely. Anyone heard of anything like this, or is it just full of Crak(tm)?

...urghh. Just rebooted for a patch that alleges fixing Apache and OpenSSL problems. Why the hell does this need a reboot?