Seemed as if last week was just a huge snowball of negativity aimed right at my face. It started off with admiring the way the TekRP website had been coming along. So many hours of work put into it for the world’s benefit, things were pretty good. Being logged into the webserver via SSH to do a couple touch ups here and there, the decision was made to try and setup a “Multisite” in WordPress. Following the directions to make backups of “.htaccess” and “wp-config.php” I simply used the “cp” command and make two additional files, “.htaccess_old” and “wp-config_old.php” to save back as the original file name if needing to restore old settings. My hot dinner that was warming my belly was put above my keyboard as I went to refill my water. This was looking to be a good night.
Then I heard it, a jangle of a dog collar and when I turned the corner to my desk, my Beagle, Sally was on my desk, paws on the keyboard in full “Turbo Eating” stance, trying to Hoover up as much of the food as possible. This was obviously the beginning of something bad.
Clearing the desk and sitting back down, I should have just walked away and done chores, watched a movie, washed my jeep at 1am, anything would have been better than trying to dig back into an SSH session as it is somehow logged into the database pushing commands. Everything was lost at the stroke of the enter key.
But it gets better!
With nothing to lose, I export the “posts.csv” and “pages.csv” direct from the database to work on recovering later. Throwing my hands up in the air, it’s time to rebuild. This time though we’re making TekRP my personal site of links and school blog posts. Zeemew is going to be a multisite that eventually will do what TekRP used to do, provide resources, a couple Minecraft servers, how-to info, a forum and customizable user profiles that will allow each individual to have a “zeemew.com/username” website. This will also include articles of reviews of peripherals, games, festivals, conventions, ect. first looks into games and interviewing the normal gamer, highlighting PC setups and actions. TekRP will just be an editor/author under Zeemew and Zeemew will overlook everything and everyone. Even the Discord will get changed to Zeemew and give members the options to post articles as they want to contribute as a community. A fun idea!
Except for (best guess) a DNS spoof that was running on the old webserver no one had a clue existed. Cybersecurity has never been my strength, because my interest is more within putting it all together and making it all work. Unfortunately, you can’t make anything cool or intricate without implementing Cybersecurity. It was time to setup multiple firewalls, routing, more VLAN’s and call AT&T for a new block of Static IP’s. Clear all DNS records, reset every single password, rebuild the LAMP server and WordPress, rebuild the database and learn how to import *.csv files back into the database.
Currently, I’m taking a break from rebuilding every post from school as their own individual post to copy/paste back into the TekRP website, which are mostly from the previous semester, but I want to retain them all. Additionally, the first review was done by LittlePickle_03 about Stardew Valley and it turned out fantastic, so that was a priority to recover over everything else. After I’m done rebuilding the posts I’m going to see about rebuilding the pages due to all the typed and posted content that took me a week just for the Garage LAN pages.
It’s going to take some time, but all I need is the “Blog” or Article section of the webpage to work for school and then I can take time, while doing school, to work on TekRP and Zeemew over the holidays. My goal was to have it all done by December to make it to the live recordings in Atlanta for the Unsubscribed Podcast with a VIP seat/invitation received from Eli_Doubletap. My thinking was, not only would I get to meet peers in the industry, but it would be a good time to say hi to the world again just before the release of “a Minecraft Movie” to get some traffic to the community.
This is truly frustrating, but there can’t be a white flag of surrender just because a loving Beagle is hungry and cursed with being born a foodie. (I think though, her hunger helped me find other issues that needed to be addressed and gave an opportunity for better security practices and hardening. Maybe if I get an IT job they will let me bring Sally to work with me as my IT sidekick?! Can you imagine what it might sound like for a Beagle to randomly howl in a Google Mega Datacenter, the thought makes me laugh.
