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A
Anonymous
January 31, 2007
Answered

Mysteriously Missing Main.asc

  • January 31, 2007
  • 2 replies
  • 579 views
Have any of you ever heard of a main.asc file being "mysteriously" deleted from an application's directory?

I'm working on a client project that was being developed on an in-house Fedora Core 5 server where I'd installed FMS. I uploaded the client's video streams and coded main.asc's for two separate applications. One of them, the larger of the two, had some very important code in there that took me several all nighter's to get right.

Long story short, the project got put on hold for a while and now I'm taking another look at it, and moving it to a server live on the internet. In doing so, I'm seeing that the main.asc file I wrote for one of the projects is just plain GONE, like it never existed. The other application is fine, untouched, but the more important of the two has another strange twist: a directory called "http" that I never created. Inside it are some streams (placed in their own subdirectories) from the application's "streams" directory that I never moved in there. And of course like I said, the main.asc file is just plain gone.

Looking at /var/log/messages doesn't give me any information (looks like the logs just rotated a day or two ago). Does anyone have any ideas how I can find out:

a) how the hell this was deleted,
b) if there's a backup somewhere on the system (already tried updatedb/locate main.asc, no help)
c) how to prevent it from happening again

Thanks in advance for any assistance you can provide.
    This topic has been closed for replies.
    Correct answer
    Thanks for your input Jay. The only conclusion I can reach is that it must have been human error. I went through ~/.bash_history and did a search for anything pertaining to main.asc, and found that instead of "cp" I used "mv" to MOVE the file to another location. Unfortunately that location was cleaned out a bit over a month ago, so the only copy of the file was deleted.

    My primary concern was that FMS somehow did it, but now that we've ruled that out, and now that I know how/why the http directory was created, I'm "OK" now.

    Again, thanks for your help. I feel like an idiot but hey, ya know...gotta lower my pride somehow ;-)

    2 replies

    A
    Anonymous
    February 1, 2007
    It's good to know the http dir and it's children are there for legitimate reasons.

    Short of human error, and attack on the server, or the server having been restored from a previous backup, I can't come up with any ideas on the missing main.asc file.
    A
    Anonymous
    Correct answer
    February 2, 2007
    Thanks for your input Jay. The only conclusion I can reach is that it must have been human error. I went through ~/.bash_history and did a search for anything pertaining to main.asc, and found that instead of "cp" I used "mv" to MOVE the file to another location. Unfortunately that location was cleaned out a bit over a month ago, so the only copy of the file was deleted.

    My primary concern was that FMS somehow did it, but now that we've ruled that out, and now that I know how/why the http directory was created, I'm "OK" now.

    Again, thanks for your help. I feel like an idiot but hey, ya know...gotta lower my pride somehow ;-)
    A
    Anonymous
    January 31, 2007
    I'm wondering if you've got some security holes there. Did you look at any of the streams? Are they something that would have been published by an authorized user, or does it appear that someone has been adding their own streams and leeching your bandwidth/connections?

    The missing main.asc is what makes me suspicious. FMS wouldn't remove its own files like that, and since other files are where they should be, it sort of rules out the file missing as a result of a system restore. Removing the main.asc would make the application wide open to abuse, so if someone wanted to leech effectively, removing the main.asc would be helpful to them.

    What do your server logs (not the FMS logs, the network level logs) tell you? Do you see anything odd? If someone broke into the server and deleted your main.asc, it wouldn't show up in the FMS logs.
    A
    Anonymous
    January 31, 2007
    Hi Jay, thanks for replying.

    As for a security break-in, I don't think that happened as this particular server from which it's missing is firewalled from the outside world denying ALL connections on ALL ports from anything except the local intranet. I'm with you in thinking FMS wouldn't delete its own file, so I'm wondering if some process on the system somehow did this (it's a Fedora Core 5 box). Only problem is, the only logfile I know to check has already rotated it appears. I dug around a few of the FMS logs and didn't see anything out of the ordinary there either.

    Again, thanks for the reply. Any other ideas or thoughts?
    A
    Anonymous
    January 31, 2007
    Well.. the presence of that http dir makes me wonder a bit. FMS creates that directory when the application makes an http request (like loadVars or remoting). FMs might also do that when the application makes a netconnection to another server, but I'm not 100% sure on that. Does you app use any loadvars or remoting calls that would have cause FMS to create that directory? You mentioned that there were some flv files in there... what's in them? Audio/video, or just data?
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