John Dilbeck Musings

I got side-tracked in May. For several months, I’ve been fighting one or more hackers who have been breaking into my brother’s site at GeorgiaDragRacing.com and installing software that attacked other computers and ran an Internet Relay Chat — both of which are not allowed by our hosting company who have been working with us to put a stop to this.

On May 5, 2004, I received a notice from our SysAdmin that the hackers had installed software once again and he had detected and deleted it. He told me that he’d been patient for a long time, but this was the final notice. One more break-in and our account would be cancelled and we’d have to find another company to host the site. There are over 2,500 pages on that site!

Since I didn’t know how they were breaking in and I’d done everthing I knew, it was time for drastic action. After a long talk with David, my brother, we decided to completely rebuild the site and remove all the scripts that we were using to power the photo album, bookstore, forum, and news updating. It was going to be a big job, but it would be less work than moving everything — including thousands of photos — to another site.

So, I looked for alternate ways to do what we’d been doing with PERL and PHP scripts. We decided to create a blog at blogger.com for the news updates, which can now be found at gdrn.blogspot.com. The photos will be hosted at ImageStation.com until we find another site that is easier to use. The bookstore was completely rebuilt using javascript and direct links to Amazon.com and the forum was deleted in favor of the mailing list hosted by Yahoo groups.

So, I had to completely redesign everything and rebuild all the pages of the site. It took about three weeks of working around the clock to get it finished, but now we’re moving on using the new tools. Most of the functionality was saved, but it was a huge job and it pulled me away from the other tasks I had scheduled for this month.

There are probably quite a few broken links on the site and I’ll have to find and squash those bugs as they come up.

So, why am I telling you about this?

When building a business on the Internet, you may not always have total control over what happens. We had to make a decision and I had to do a lot of work to do our best to keep the site open. Now, we’re running no custom scripts and nobody but me knows the password to the site. Hopefully, that will foil the hackers.

In this case, the bad guys won the battle, but I still intend to win the war.

As part of the recent reorganization of GeorgiaDragRacing.com, David has moved the news page to a new Blog at gdrn.blogspot.com.

There, you’ll find news and information about drag racing in Georgia, updated whenever there is something worthy of reporting.

For reasons associated with hacking activity on our account, I’ve been forced to completely rebuild GeorgiaDragRacing.com. All 2,000+ pages have been rebuilt and uploaded to the site, and that’s what has kept me very busy for the last couple of weeks or so.

Fortunately, all of my large sites are built using Radio Userland’s database and scripting abilities. It takes some of the work out of managing them, and even rebuilding them when necessary. Nevertheless, it was a lot of work and I still have many broken links to find and fix because we no longer use any scripts on that site.

Of course, this means that thousands of links on the Internet, especially those pointing to the photos in the photo album are now broken, but there’s nothing I can do about that from my end.

All because somebody decided to invade the site and cause problems.

Sigh.

It’s a real shame that it isn’t easier to be creative and helpful than destructive.

Moving on….