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Astalavista.com hacked, including details

astalavista.com

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Re: Astalavista.com hacked, including details

#61

Post by mistermann »

nertzy wrote: post #55
DrJokepu wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being a Latin geek myself I can't help but point out that nouns in the fourth declension (u stem) also end in -us in singular and receive an -us affix in plural as well. "Virus" is however, in the second declension (virus -i n. "slime, poison, goo") with the oddity of being neutral while having a second declension -us ending which is normally a feature of masculine nouns. And indeed, its plural would be "viri".

Neuter nouns of the second declension don't generally have plurals that end in -i, but rather in -a, so "vira" would be equally possible. It's also important to note that scholars don't actually know the proper plural of virus because they haven't really found one in extant literature. Wikipedia has a longer discussion at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plural_of_virus#Virus

Doo doo doo doo, doo doodoo do, Doo doo doo doo, doo doodoo do, Doo doo doo doo, doo doodoo do, Doo, doodoodoo, doo doo doo doo doo....

A bit hard to communicate, but that's the keyboard cat playing all of you off.

Re: Astalavista.com hacked, including details

#63

Post by enneff »

jlcheng wrote: post #53
enneff wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did have off-site backups, which the hacker found and erased. One strategy that I employ to mitigate this is to have my backup service connect to the production server, rather than the other way around. That way if your production services are compromised, your backups remain untouched (on a machine that's running no services, behind a firewall, etc, and for all intents invisible).

I thought the typical definition of offsite backup also means data is backed up to a media like tape and stored in a different location. How is your offsite backup implemented? Is the data stored on a network drive, or backed up to tape?

My understanding is that an offsite backup is, as the name implies, a backup that is stored at a geographically separate location to your production site.

I have a few servers deployed at various locations around the world, and I have a machine here at home that performs rsnapshot daily backups of their files. I then make bi-monthly backups of those backups, and store them in a saftey deposit box at a bank. This means that if my servers go down, I can restore them to within a day. If my house burns down, I still have my data to within two-weeks.

Re: Astalavista.com hacked, including details

#64

Post by psyklic »

sev wrote: post #34
Confusion wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Offtopic, but please, don't use 'virii'. The correct plural is 'viruses'. 'Virii' is wrong for two reaons: 1) The Latin plural of word ending in -us is not -ii. -i at best. 2) 'Virus' doesn't have a Latin plural, because its meaning is like (in the sense of not having a plural) 'sand': it already denotes a multitude.

Why is it that the plural of "radius" is "radii" but the plural of "virus" is not "viri"? I don't see "virus" as inherently denoting a multitude in the dictionary. Just curious.

Interestingly, English words with irregular forms which are infrequently used often revert back to regular forms. The 'why' is simply because people prefer to say "viruses," either because they forgot the irregular plural form or because they prefer how a regular form sounds.

Re: Astalavista.com hacked, including details

#66

Post by jlcheng »

enneff wrote: post #63
jlcheng wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought the typical definition of offsite backup also means data is backed up to a media like tape and stored in a different location. How is your offsite backup implemented? Is the data stored on a network drive, or backed up to tape?

My understanding is that an offsite backup is, as the name implies, a backup that is stored at a geographically separate location to your production site. I have a few servers deployed at various locations around the world, and I have a machine here at home that performs rsnapshot daily backups of their files. I then make bi-monthly backups of those backups, and store them in a saftey deposit box at a bank. This mean…

That's pretty much how it should be done. Let's hope the guys at astalavista is smart enough to do that. Your approach adds an additional layer of protection in case, as you'd put it, someone gets into your home server and deletes them. That, and tapes are less likely to get corrupted or become unreadable than the drives on your server, which may cut down on recovery time.

When your business gets bigger, it might be worth it to look into dedicated hosting and have the datacenter do the backup for you. After all, you want to spend your time managing your IT crew, rather than driving those tapes to the bank :)

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