It was only a matter of time before this happened. Now that “the web” is migrating to “the cloud”, The hackers and the NSA Will try to break into “the cloud”.
This server is no longer a “real” server, but rather a virtual server. This means it exists only on a large shared disk system. When I want to “reboot” the server, all that really means is to reload the image of the virtual machine from their disk drives back into random CPU cores not physically connected to anything else. There is no hardware dedicated specifically to running this server, or any other “server” at linode or the bigger Amazon Web Services.
The exact nature of the problem will be announced on the 10th – servers are being patched now so that the fix will be in place before the bad guys are told what problem was found. Based on similar previous flaws, the issue is likely that a virtual machine is able to escape its virtual prison and invade into the real underlying hardware.
If the system fails to reboot, it may be down until I’m able to regain control. That is all.
Server went down around 6:00 PM (ET) Sunday as promised. It is back up, although it did require my intervention as I don’t yet understand systemd (haha – linux reference)
At least the web server is back up