Spore user Michael Brodesky wanted me to pass along the thought that if you lost content during the recent crash, you should check the Internet Archive, in particular the Wayback Machine. I can't really figure out what it chooses to archive and what it chooses to leave behind, but there's a chance it might be able to help some of you out.
While I've got you all here, I'd like to point out that Spore-friend and user Todd Courtois is still looking for folks to help defray the expenses he took on to try to get the drive recovered. His efforts were heroic and unstinting, and it seems unfair that he should have to eat that two hundred bucks when he was trying to do something for all of us. Thanks to the people who've contributed so far!
Also about two weeks ago, I discovered an unauthorized instance of psyBNC running under the ID of a Spore user. Ironically enough, the binary had been renamed 'pine', which is how I noticed that it was running at all. I feared the worst and started investigating, but it appears that said user's password got snarfed when another machine with a mission similar to Spore's had gotten hacked more severely. The degree of compromise on Spore was limited to the psyBNC instance and a fairly pathetic attempt to gain a setuid root shell, which failed. This is good, because if the exploit had been any more severe, we would have had to wipe and restore the system, which would have been a gigantic pain in the ass. Let's hear it for incompetent script kiddies!
Back on May 15th, when this patch was announced, we upgraded our instance of MySQL to the patched version discussed in this Debian advisory. This shouldn't have introduced any user-visible changes to the system.
I've added an IP (144.92.129.136) to the /etc/postfix/client_access file to see if it will allow a Gunroom user who's mail server is improperly configured to post to the listserv list. Ran postmap and postfix reload. Fingers crossed...
Based upon content gleaned from the internet archive site at archive.org, I've rebuilt the homepage for www.arthurwatts.com along with one secondary page. This makes a nicer placeholder than what I was using previously. Fortunately I have a backup of the entire site - but on a Mac a friend is borrowing for a few weeks.
To facilitate administration of the Gunroom website (www.hmssurprise.org), which sports four administrators working in rotation to monitor and administer the Listserv mailing list and web site, I've ensured that all of the users are members of the hmssur group. Added users include: larry, revref, and skydaver.
Bad news, people. Todd heard back from the new data recovery place, and they said that even after replacing the heads in the drive, the media in the drive was too thrashed for recovery. I don't know how much of a postmortem they did, so I don't know what happened to the drive. I'm guessing it was just plain defective. Todd and I were pretty much convinced that the problem was a known fault in the Fujitsu drive hardware, so we're just as surprised and disappointed as any of you. Even though the drive was unrecoverable, though, Todd needs help defraying the $75 shipping costs for the first recovery place and the $100 evaluation for the current one, so if you're feeling generous, please get in touch with him. He's done a lot of work to make this happen.