A few days ago, a client’s data center (well, actually a server room) "vanished" overnight.
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@EnigmaRotor reading this at lunch in a cafe near my house and I keep chuckling and smiling from ear to ear. @stefano is such a treasure
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A few days ago, a client’s data center (well, actually a server room) "vanished" overnight. My monitoring showed that all devices were unreachable. Not even the ISP routers responded, so I assumed a sudden connectivity drop. The strange part? Not even via 4G.
I then suspected a power failure, but the UPS should have sent an alert.
The office was closed for the holidays, but I contacted the IT manager anyway. He was home sick with a serious family issue, but he got moving.
To make a long story short: the company deals in gold and precious metals. They have an underground bunker with two-meter thick walls. They were targeted by a professional gang. They used a tactic seen in similar hits: they identify the main power line, tamper with it at night, and send a massive voltage spike through it.
The goal is to fry all alarm and surveillance systems. Even if battery-backed, they rarely survive a surge like that. Thieves count on the fact that during holidays, owners are away and fried systems can't send alerts. Monitoring companies often have reduced staff and might not notice the "silence" immediately.
That is exactly what happened here. But there is a "but": they didn't account for my Uptime Kuma instance monitoring their MikroTik router, installed just weeks ago. Since it is an external check, it flagged the lack of response from all IPs without needing an internal alert to be triggered from the inside.
The team rushed to the site and found the mess. Luckily, they found an emergency electrical crew to bypass the damage and restore the cameras and alarms. They swapped the fried server UPS with a spare and everything came back up.
The police warned that the chances of the crew returning the next night to "finish" the job were high, though seeing the systems back online would likely make them move on. They also warned that thieves sometimes break in just to destroy servers to wipe any video evidence.
Nothing happened in the end. But in the meantime, I had to sync all their data off-site (thankfully they have dual 1Gbps FTTH), set up an emergency cluster, and ensure everything was redundant.
Never rely only on internal monitoring. Never.
@stefano you’re a hero Stefano! As your Fedi friend and documentary filmmaker I hope I get preferential treatment when one of your amazing stories gets optioned for a film
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@EnigmaRotor reading this at lunch in a cafe near my house and I keep chuckling and smiling from ear to ear. @stefano is such a treasure
@_elena@mastodon.social When you direct the movie, can I star as the legendary @stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe ?
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@stefano so refreshing to read a quality tech tale on Mastodon. Thanks for sharing!
@bojanlandekic thank you! I'm just trying to spread some real life experiences
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@jamesoff
I have
my backup scripts write their return code in a file.I monitor file content and mtime, get an alert if content not 0 or file too old
I also regularly manually test backup restore.
Then I can sleep
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@stefano This is such a good, if niche, example of "paying attention to the fundamentals and the alerts covers all sorts of things you'd never imagine happening."
Thanks for sharing.
@neurovagrant thank you! My rule is: we need moooarr alerts, as you never know how and when (not if - we know it will happen) your alertil system will break.
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A few days ago, a client’s data center (well, actually a server room) "vanished" overnight. My monitoring showed that all devices were unreachable. Not even the ISP routers responded, so I assumed a sudden connectivity drop. The strange part? Not even via 4G.
I then suspected a power failure, but the UPS should have sent an alert.
The office was closed for the holidays, but I contacted the IT manager anyway. He was home sick with a serious family issue, but he got moving.
To make a long story short: the company deals in gold and precious metals. They have an underground bunker with two-meter thick walls. They were targeted by a professional gang. They used a tactic seen in similar hits: they identify the main power line, tamper with it at night, and send a massive voltage spike through it.
The goal is to fry all alarm and surveillance systems. Even if battery-backed, they rarely survive a surge like that. Thieves count on the fact that during holidays, owners are away and fried systems can't send alerts. Monitoring companies often have reduced staff and might not notice the "silence" immediately.
That is exactly what happened here. But there is a "but": they didn't account for my Uptime Kuma instance monitoring their MikroTik router, installed just weeks ago. Since it is an external check, it flagged the lack of response from all IPs without needing an internal alert to be triggered from the inside.
The team rushed to the site and found the mess. Luckily, they found an emergency electrical crew to bypass the damage and restore the cameras and alarms. They swapped the fried server UPS with a spare and everything came back up.
The police warned that the chances of the crew returning the next night to "finish" the job were high, though seeing the systems back online would likely make them move on. They also warned that thieves sometimes break in just to destroy servers to wipe any video evidence.
Nothing happened in the end. But in the meantime, I had to sync all their data off-site (thankfully they have dual 1Gbps FTTH), set up an emergency cluster, and ensure everything was redundant.
Never rely only on internal monitoring. Never.
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@EnigmaRotor reading this at lunch in a cafe near my house and I keep chuckling and smiling from ear to ear. @stefano is such a treasure
@_elena @EnigmaRotor thank you!
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@_elena@mastodon.social When you direct the movie, can I star as the legendary @stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe ?
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@_elena@mastodon.social When you direct the movie, can I star as the legendary @stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe ?
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@randomized @rhoot @stefano how do you monitor your sleep
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@stefano you’re a hero Stefano! As your Fedi friend and documentary filmmaker I hope I get preferential treatment when one of your amazing stories gets optioned for a film
@_elena Thank you! Sure, I will
But, to be honest, I don't think any of those stories will ever be a film.The big, most scary one is yet to come, anyway...
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@stux thank you! Yes, that's a very wise approach. I have some internal and external monitoring tools. And the monitoring tools monitoring the monitoring tools, with different technologies (so a bug won't hit all the tools at the same time). Yet, I always feel I need moooarrr monitoring
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@_elena@mastodon.social @stefano@mastodon.bsd.cafe How do I say "I knew it! I'm surrounded by assholes!" in Italian?
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@randomized @rhoot @stefano how do you monitor your sleep
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A few days ago, a client’s data center (well, actually a server room) "vanished" overnight. My monitoring showed that all devices were unreachable. Not even the ISP routers responded, so I assumed a sudden connectivity drop. The strange part? Not even via 4G.
I then suspected a power failure, but the UPS should have sent an alert.
The office was closed for the holidays, but I contacted the IT manager anyway. He was home sick with a serious family issue, but he got moving.
To make a long story short: the company deals in gold and precious metals. They have an underground bunker with two-meter thick walls. They were targeted by a professional gang. They used a tactic seen in similar hits: they identify the main power line, tamper with it at night, and send a massive voltage spike through it.
The goal is to fry all alarm and surveillance systems. Even if battery-backed, they rarely survive a surge like that. Thieves count on the fact that during holidays, owners are away and fried systems can't send alerts. Monitoring companies often have reduced staff and might not notice the "silence" immediately.
That is exactly what happened here. But there is a "but": they didn't account for my Uptime Kuma instance monitoring their MikroTik router, installed just weeks ago. Since it is an external check, it flagged the lack of response from all IPs without needing an internal alert to be triggered from the inside.
The team rushed to the site and found the mess. Luckily, they found an emergency electrical crew to bypass the damage and restore the cameras and alarms. They swapped the fried server UPS with a spare and everything came back up.
The police warned that the chances of the crew returning the next night to "finish" the job were high, though seeing the systems back online would likely make them move on. They also warned that thieves sometimes break in just to destroy servers to wipe any video evidence.
Nothing happened in the end. But in the meantime, I had to sync all their data off-site (thankfully they have dual 1Gbps FTTH), set up an emergency cluster, and ensure everything was redundant.
Never rely only on internal monitoring. Never.
@stefano 10+ years ago i started volunteering at a festival. Everything was new that year including the small outdoor racks for the area field routers (Juniper MX80). They barely fit but we managed. The racks were left in the sun in the summer. It was only when we enabled Observium (LibreNMS predecessor) that graphs almost everything it gets from SNMP that we discovered the inlet temperature was getting close to 80 degrees C. #monitorallthethings
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@stefano 10+ years ago i started volunteering at a festival. Everything was new that year including the small outdoor racks for the area field routers (Juniper MX80). They barely fit but we managed. The racks were left in the sun in the summer. It was only when we enabled Observium (LibreNMS predecessor) that graphs almost everything it gets from SNMP that we discovered the inlet temperature was getting close to 80 degrees C. #monitorallthethings
@stefano since the racks were designed for outdoor use they were water tight, only had small holes in the bottom for cables and very limited infrastructure for air venting like downward facing holes in the “roof”. They could supposedly float.
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@stefano since the racks were designed for outdoor use they were water tight, only had small holes in the bottom for cables and very limited infrastructure for air venting like downward facing holes in the “roof”. They could supposedly float.
@stefano We ended up cutting some wide cable pipes at an angle and duct taping it to the router so we covered the air inlet with one pipe and the air exhaust with another pipe. The other end of the ducts were led to the outside of the rack, lifted off the ground and pointed downwards to avoid water. That provided new fresh air and a way to get rid of the hot air. We also fashioned some shadow with a sheet of plywood. The year after we put some smaller equipment in
and definitely at the very least a cameo with a line from Spaceballs
sure, just continue to practice with your Italian
