I almost think I am gaining on accomplishing this goal. Originally, I imagined an old pc in the house. I would learn to install Linux and / or Apache and MySQL, whatever is needed – (which is part of what I need to learn!) Then, I would think of stuff to “serve up” and play around with managing all of it behind the scenes.
Well, instead, I’ve bought some domain names. After perseverating way too long, I got suewolff.com, and learninghubs.net on GoDaddy. Then later, when I thought more about the hosting concept, I rented space at AnHost and bought techminstrel.com to go there. I learned to change my nameservers so I could build stuff for all the domains in one place-at AnHost. Oh, and actually, I grabbed another name from Yahoo for a professional association I work with wampnw.org. It’s very low-cost.
After poking around on C-panel, I discovered Fantastico and used it to install WordPress and mess around with a blog. Suddenly for the professional association management, I found myself setting up email accounts and subdomains.
Then a weird thing happened….that night, after hours wandering around on the server, I had binary dreams! All night, I worried about what I didn’t know, about what I might have left open to the whole world of hackers. I saw logs listing strange usernames. One was ‘jonah’, and I knew that was not a user I had created, so in my dream imagined this to be the famous hacker that uses some script to ‘swallow the whole site’. Then packets started going by, first in spiky little oscilliscope reads, then bigger so I could make out the 0’s from the 1’s.
Remembering my Cisco training, I decoded the messages and saw commands like “get admin pw”, “login admin guest”, ...blah blah blah many more that make no sense but added up to having everything taken over by spammers and script kiddies. (I don’t even know much about script kiddies or hackers anymore.)
I kept arguing with myself that I was dreaming and not looking at an actual computer screen, and that there was no need to sleepwalk and try to fix it. In the morning when I woke up, I was really, really happy that I had had this kind of dream. A visit to my server logs didn’t reveal any activity besides my own, and my sites seemed ok.
I have however added a new thing to the list – learn some simple server-side security.
