On Sunday 18 May 2014 3:12 pm, Larry Linder wrote:
> One of our servers had an unusual illness.
> Server loaded our internal network and our Internet connection down to a
> stop. When it rebooted it took a few minutes before it started again.
> Symptoms:
> 1.  /sbin/ifconfig - eth0 had a large number of Tx & Rd in counters.
> 2. DVD could not be used to write a DVD.
> When you rebooted the system and tried to reload system or run a
> diagnostic, you set the boot device as DVD and it immediately ignored the
> DVD and booted the system.
> 3. On reboot it complained that there was an error on line 2 of iptables.
> when you looked at /etc/rc.d/init.d there were two small files named
> Iptables with a capital I and ipmievd also with a capital I.
> 4. To stop what ever was happening we sniffed the network and found an
> address it was trying to access.   212.7.208.65, added it to hosts.deny and
> eth0 shut down.  On reboot eth0 did start.
> 5. Manually restarted /etc/network.
>
> Other oddities:
> messages, messages.1, messages.2 were empty.
> messages.3 quit shortly after 12 AM EST on 23 April.  Same time as Ethernet
> went down.
> When you did echo $PATH there were to added directories added before normal
> path.
> "vi" quit working on user accounts and if you tried to "vi filename" it
> said that "vim" could not be found.  However if you became root "vi" worked
> normally.
> Looked at /boot/grub/grub.conf, /sbin/init/ files and all looked normal.
>
> 6.  Tried www.centros.org - for more information it was immediately flagged
> by brouser as "malware" in bold red letters.   Closed down browser.
>
> 7.  Removed the two files with capital letters or 30 bytes each.
> Rebooted system and "iptables" error went away.
>
> 8.  Used Rescue from install disk and it ran for about 5 minutes and said
> it is safe to reboot.  I gave me a list of files that were different.  Did
> not get to capture the list.
>
> 9.  There is no trace of anything other than some file dates were 23 April.
> Since internal Internet was down there was no way to do a "diff" on
> directories of a working system.
>
> Withe a VOIP phone system was killed by problem as it brought the Internet
> down.    When you pinged Google name server 8.8.8.8 over a 1/2 hour period
> you had anywhere from 30% to 98% packet loss.
>
> The import part is that we do not know were it came from as we are behind a
> router / firewall in modem.
>
> Thanks in advance for any ideas on how to prevent recurrence.
> Hate to work on nice sunny Sunday afternoons.
>
> Larry Linder

Internet works now.
Things that do not work.
To get "cups" to run we had to use yum and remove it and reload it.  Yum even 
save a copy of our "configs" so rebuilding was simply copy saved configs to 
configs.   With a gob of printers and plotters it would be long time to get 
it back running.
/var/log/cron, /var/lot/messages, are updated but still empty.  Copies were 
made of cron and messages with new extension.
KMail does not shut down properly, when you reboot, it thinks that kmail is 
still running.
VMware does not now automatically restart on a reboot.
Its about time to low level format disk OS is on and reload.
Our scheme of keeping OS one one disk and all other directories on another 
large disk save us again.
"cron" and "mesages" update but are empty indicates that we did not get all.
I would like to do a clean install of 5.10 another box and do a "diff" to see 
what was changed.
One thing I am going to do is once a system is up and running make a script to 
save all config files and put it away on a dvd for that OS version.

Don't think this system should ever go back into production until we know what 
happened and then reload the OS.   We are still wondering how this system is 
the only one that got clobbered.   

Larry Linder