Web Hosting Talk : Web Hosting Main Forums : Hosting Security and Technology : Cobalt issue you should know about

[Keeg]

here is an interesting little thing with the cobalt raq's. the tmp directory is located in the / partition of course anyone can write to the tmp file thats what its for. however if the / partition fills up all of the cobalt generated files will overwrite their existing files and configurations with 0 byte files essentially rendering your box a paperweight. the solution is to move the tmp dir (/home has the space)this will solve the problem

Steve

[Chicken]

I just hope you read this somewhere and didn't have it happen

[Keeg]

you will see the complaints about our 10 hr outage for 90 of our customers very soon. yes it did happen, and let me tell you what a pain in the butt.

Steve

[Pig]

I'm sorry to hear that you had it happen to you. What files did it write over? I have a RaQ3, can you tell me how I would go about moving the tmp folder to /home?

[Edited by pig on 12-04-2000 at 09:44 PM]

[Félix C.Courtemanche]

you would have to mount it that way...
I have the best solution: Do NOT offer telnet access from a RAQ; this is just looking after trouble.

There are much less risk that someone will do something stupid on your computer when they have to code it through CGI/perl.

[Chicken]

Originally posted by Keeg
you will see the complaints about our 10 hr outage for 90 of our customers very soon. yes it did happen, and let me tell you what a pain in the butt.

Steve

Yikes, looking forward to getting swamped on the boards with those 'satisfied customers'... yeeeeee. I appreciate that you posted that, since many own/lease the lil' buggers.

[Keeg]

actually you dont have to allow telnet in order to have them accomplish this little feat, they can use the scheduled backup option thats avaliable through their site admin interface. it overwrites vitually everything passwd pam.d group http.conf httpd.srm access.conf, essentially everything the cobalt raq controls. the prevention is quite easy the fix is much harder so do the prevention by running this command from root
mv /tmp/* /home/tmp ; rm -rf /tmp ; ln -s /home/tmp /tmp
that line will move your /tmp dir to /home/tmp (there is lots of space here and if you run out it wont break anything) and then it deletes the existing /tmp and creates a symlink so everything still works.

Steve

[nox]

No, not drastic, just can't get it to find /tmp

Here's what happened...

[root@host /]# mv /tmp/* /home/tmp ; rm -rf /tmp ; ln -s /home/tmp /tmp
mv: /tmp/*: No such file or directory

help...

[CJB]

That error just means you didn't have any files stored in your /tmp directory. As long as you ran the full command Steve pasted, it will still symlink /tmp to /home/tmp.

[nox]

Thanks CJB. So I'm safe. A $200 a month paperweight wasn't on my Christmas shopping list.