Laura was out in a meeting today, so I was alone with the kids, the
two little delightful munchkins. They were getting antsy to get out, so
around four thirty, we decided to go to the park. I put on their shoes
and got them their clothes. Jaimito was particularly impatient. "Go go
go gogo….waaaaaaaaa."
"Jaimito, Daddy has to go pee pee. We’re still going to the park. I’ll be right back."
Suddenly from out of nowhere, a breeze picked up. I felt the back of
my neck tingle. It was a sinking feeling. I was miles from home and I
knew there was no one to save me.
I answered my frantically ringing cell phone. "James O’Malley."
«Hey James, Jose Camacho»
«How are you, Jose, how can I help you.»
«There seems to be a problem with our bandwidth. I’m not getting
access to the Internet, and my provider said that they are not showing
any connectivity problems with our site.»
«Hmmm,» I said as I did the pee pee dance. Damn! I lamented, tech support.
By then, the wind was blowing like a 2 year old lying on the floor
throwing a tantrum. I knew it was bad. Really bad. None of the hatches
was battened… or whatever you do with hatches. «Let’s take a look,» I
said as I logged in via secure shell. «You look good from here. I don’t
see a problem.» I was puzzled. I asked him about his machines, checked
IP’s, checked the web caching proxy. Nothing. I sent him running around
checking cables, different machines, different web-sites. Nothing.
Jaimito was still wailing.
Oh my God, the Cape wasn’t where I thought it was. I realized I was
in the wrong machine. «Jose, you won’t believe this. I was logged into
another client’s machine. Forget everything I said.» I felt like an
idiot, but we quickly got back to work. No time to fret. This was life
or death. I got him to go to the machine and log in. I wanted him to
run an IP traffic program so we could analyse from where the flood of
traffic originated. «Log in, type i-p-t-r-a-f and hit enter.» He typed
it wrong. I spelled it again and I got him into the program.
Turn into the storm, I kept repeating to myself, but it’s tough.
When you are being buffeted from all sides, you can’t tell from where
the winds are blowing. Suddenly a big one came crashing over the port
side. My cell phone started to beep. Arrgh, low battery. I quickly
found a charger cord and plugged myself in. I was now tied down on
deck. I wasn’t going anywhere. If the boat sank, I was going to go with
it. I still had to use the bathroom and I could no longer see what the
kids were doing, and the mosquitos were ravaging my legs.
I continued to lead him through menus and commands, having him read
to me the program’s output letter by letter. Every mistake costs
valuable time. What could be going on here, I thought? The machine is
spewing out tons of traffic, but I can’t log in. Normally, even when
traffic is heavy, the encrypted shell will at least give me a login
prompt. It looks like a ICMP flood from a virus worm, but I have that
blocked at the firewall. What is going on!
«Check the protocols on the outgoing connections,» I said. «I bet
it’s a large email attachment. And I bet it’s going over the IP-sec
encrypted tunnel.» Sure enough that’s what it was, encrypted
communications between nodes on their VPN. IP-sec packets take
precedence over normal Internet traffic, so if you flood the tunnel,
traffic outside receives a lower priority. «I bet someone sent a huge
email attachment and it’s stuffing up the tunnel.»
Jaimito is quiet now. I don’t hear him, but as any sailor knows,
that is the time to be afraid, be very afraid. «Hold on,» I told Jose.
I put the phone down and made my way to our bedroom. The floor was
sticky. Odd. The devastation I saw would bring a grown man to tears:
lipstick, makeup orange juice everywhere. The storm wrought more damage
than I could have imagined. "Jaimito!!" He looked up at me with guilty
eyes and handed me the smashed lipstick as if to say, I was just
looking to give this to you, Daddy. "Oh, you little boy!" I said in a
stern voice, which as any parent knows is more than sufficient to
initiate a full blown guilt cry. Jaimito started bawling again. Such a
good little repentant boy. I love him. But now was not the time, the
storm was coming again, and I needed to get back to my station.
I picked up the phone. «Jose, are you there? Good, now we see that
it’s a large email attachment. Let’s try to delete it from the mail
queue.» Type the command /root/qmHandel -l | less, then look for the
unique id of the email in the queue. Then type /root/qmHandel -dxxxx.
Rinse, lather and repeat until the queue is empty. I quickly realized
that the task was too complicated to attempt in such a tumult. «Let’s
just kill the whole email server, » I said. «Type k-i-l-l-a-l-l -9
q-m-a-i-l—s-e-n-d… no, not sent… s-e-n-d. Okay, got it. Did it
return an error. No? Okay, hit the up arrow and repeat the command
until you see it say "no process found." » This carried on for a while.
Mistakes, corrections, return to the command. I would leave the phone
make a quick circle of the house to see that hatches were battened and
attempt the log in remotely. «I’m in!»
I exclaimed. «Okay, that’s what it was, Jose. Let me go into the queue
and delete the e-mails. I’ll have it fixed in a few minutes.» I hung up
the phone and breathed a sigh of relief. I ran to the bathroom before I
exploded and Jaimito started wailing again as if to say, I waited all
that time and you’re still not going to take me to the park?! Poor
little thing. Of course, Olaia was a little angel, she stayed calm
throughout the perfect storm.