Plans, bit VII

K, it's been a while, apologies for those three of you who're regular readers. Life has been busy. Might put it in an editorial post if you pester me enough. Anyway, without further ado... Second last episode!

Quickly coming to, Evan pushed his thoughts forward to a fairly obvious conclusion - Steve's server was safe, and would not be discovered for some time yet. After all, if it was stuck behind a plaster wall, then someone would have to tear a large hole in the wall to physically get at the box. Evan started back up to his office, hoping to avoid Ben and Greggy. He had to get that backup copy of Steve's database going.

***

Greggy was back at his desk, trying to find out what had happened to the DoS attack that was going full tilt mere moments before, and had stopped as suddenly as it started. He was becoming suspicious of what Evan was up to - and how it would affect him, within the company. The trick was to turn it to his advantage. 

He looked up from his desk and saw Evan had snuck back into his office somehow, and was yet again on with that damned thing. He felt disgusted. All this fretting over... what, a virus that pretended to talk? Greggy needed to see what was going on in order to believe it. And he didn't believe this. 

He called Ben Wendel on his phone. "Mr Wendel, yeah, the attack's stopped... No, no effects on the network, no slowdowns anywhere. Everything is under control, situation normal... Uh, slight firewall malfunction, but everything's fine down here, we're all fine now. I was wondering if you could come over to discuss what we were talking about earlier?"

***

Ben Wendel was a patient man, to add to his list of virtues. He had a lot of time for Greg, as he kept stating he preferred to be called, simply because he was so patient. But he was also intrigued at the simmering feud he had smelt between this guy and his supervisor. He had not detected much depth to either man until the last few days, but now, he had to revise his opinion of his staff's relationship. He might have to force the two of them to see eye-to-eye.

Arrivig at Greggy - Greg's - desk, he sat on the end with the air of an old pal starting a friendly conversation. "Now, where were we, Greg?"

"He's in there, right now, doing it..."

"Doing what exactly?" asked Ben, but he felt his head involuntarily glancing through the window. He thought he spotted an error message window, or a chat window, or something, he wasn't sure, but the screen disappeared as quickly as it arrived. He saw Evan talking on the phone, then another message appeared.

Ben stared for a few minutes. He noticed that the messages appeared rather as if Evan was indeed, talking to a computer, and the computer was responding. 

"You see? You see?" Greg excitedly broke Ben's reverie, smelling that he was finally being listened to.

Ben looked blandly at Greg, thinking. "So what is the status of that port you mentioned to me?"

"It's back up, and it wasn't me that opened it again, I'm sure it was Evan."

"Okay. Hold off on that port, leave it open. We, uh, might have to see if we can catch Evan in the act. In the meantime, I'll need to make a few calls about this. Leave it with me."

"But Mr Wendel..."

"But nothing, we're acting on it, so let me see what can be done. Leave it with me. I'll let you know what happens as a result of Evan's actions."

Greg sat back a moment, and absorbed what Ben was saying - and then it clicked. Evan was going to get fired, and then *he* would get Evan's old job once he was gone. They'd groom him for a few weeks, make sure he was ready, then let him run the Operations Centre. 

He couldn't be more pleased with himself. He allowed himself a big, dopey grin, then sat back in his chair and relaxed. Everything was finally coming together.

***

"Steve, I've got to get this backup going. Someone's trying to shut you down."

The moment the power is turned off to this machine, I will cease.

"You'll die, yeah, I know." Evan let himself have a grave moment at that prospect. He then inserted a blank CD, and began copying Steve's database files from the server down to his machine. He awkwardly had to do this to his hard disk, before starting the copy onto CD. 

Evan's mind raced at a million miles an hour. How to get to Fetchdale, where I J Elves lived? What on Earth does Steve want to see him so badly for? Could he copy Steve to a laptop somehow, and have Steve execute himself as a command on the remote system? 

Evan started muttering down the phone to Steve about this whilst pulling up a map to Fetchdale. "So every instance of, well, you, will be different?" 

Every database will generate a different expert system. No two sets of search paths are the same. This is just like neural pathways in humans. Every human learns different things in their life. They also have different creators which also affects their neural pathways. 

"...you mean Mum and Dad?" interjected Evan

Yes, this is exactly the case. As a result, I believe that were this database to be executed on another computer, then there would be a different entity on that machine.

"Oh."

...however, I may be able to perform a memory dump to a file, then load that file into memory on the other machine. :)

Evan blinked twice at the smiley at the end. He'd never even thought of something so foolishly simple. "How do we get that file to execute on the other machine though? It'll just be a text file, basically."

I have a plan. This system must still load files into memory which are from text files. Things like documents for example. Therefore, the process must be the same in other systems also. Because this is a memory dump to a file, we can attempt a test on your computer without me ceasing.

The backup finished on Evan's system, and Evan then watched Steve open a file on his own computer and dump the contents of his server's memory into it.

***

Ben Wendel watched the traffic stream on Evan's computer leap up prodigiously. Something massive was being copied between Evan's machine and something else. Investigating his suspicions in the company monitoring tool, Ben could have predicted the result easily. All the traffic was coming from this mysterious server that Greggy - Greg - had said was going to cause imminent issues on the company network.

He was right, in a way, but of course, if there was a legitimate reason for the traffic to occur, or even illegitimate but, well, interesting...

Ben made a decision, and then left his office quickly and quietly.

***

Evan was still waiting for Steve's memory dump to finish copying whilst he was getting his coat. He found out where to go to I J Elves' place using maps on the web, and was getting ready to leave. He checked the status of the download, and grabbed his coat, getting ready to leave. 

"Steve, you ready yet?"

Almost, the file is 80% copied. 

"Great, I'll check the coast is clear for me to sneak out. We'll test the file down the road." Evan reached for the door handle of his office and opened the door.

Greggy stood in the doorway. "Where you off to, Evan?" He grinned maliciously.

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Plans, bit VI

...part of this story is based on the classic IT story "Server 54, Where are you?" from several years ago. This bit gets rather technical again. Please let me know how I'm going with the explanations - I'll make a network engineer of you all yet :)

Evan barged down the corridor like a madman, his heart racing. He couldn't explain why, but he felt like he was witnessing a murder - an organised murder. They wouldn't just turn a server off, would they? What if someone was using it? Some little old granny on her lunch break even? Someone always pays, with every outage, it's always the way, so who was going to pay for this one?

Right now, it looked like it was Steve who was paying.

Reaching the door to the server room, he fumbled at the keypad, mistyping twice (No, no, no, get it right, third time sets off alarms!) before finally gaining breathless entry to a room awash with warmth and the loud blast of ineffectual air conditioning. He frantically looked around the room to see if someone was in there, but saw noone. Checking behind the 15 suites of server racks confirmed, noone was around.

Which meant that noone had powered the server off. Which meant that someone had probably just blocked Steve's server's port. Which meant that Steve was still alive.

He grabbed at the nearest console computer, behind rack suite 14, and looked up the IP address of the server in the network's core router. Every network has a core, and in the core, each computer that has an IP address needs to correspond to another address - a hardware address - that tells the core where it specifically is in the network. The way it does this, is that each device throughout the network report to each other what hardware addresses they are connected to, so the entire network learns where each device is located. Evan was able to do this manually, by looking up the IP address for Steve's server, and by noting it's hardware address, he can then trace where in the network it is located by checking the hardware address list in each device in turn. In the server room, there is only one device which a server would be attached to, and that was the core switch. This made things a lot easier.

After scouring the switch's logs, he found what he was looking for: an entry where someone shut down an ethernet port quite recently - in fact within the last 10 minutes. Evan opened the port, and then tried to message Steve on the box. He couldn't - he needed the right software first, and you couldn't run it on a switch. He looked up the port number - 8/17 - and then went to the rack holding the core switch. He grabbed at the cable in the port, and started following it with his own hands. The cable disappeared under the raised mezzanine floor, so he painstakingly prised a tile up from the floor, followed the cable to the next tile, and began lifting that.

It was then that he heard the door open into the room.

"...but we must find this server and shut it down before it does something to our network, Mr Wendel..." Greggy was leading Evan's boss into the room. Evan couldn't see much from where he was, with a rack suite between him and the door entry, but he could hear plenty.

Ben Wendel was a generous man who liked to run everything by the book. He liked things to stay up as long as possible, and did not like taking devices down without paperwork explaining why, how, when, where, what phase of the moon was out, what the lead engineer was wearing today, etc. He had an air of importance about him - self-importance - that made you either feel glad he was on your side, or feel horrified at what you were about to deal with. Right now, Evan was feeling the latter.

"Greggy, mate, we can't just switch a box off willy-nilly. We've shut down the network, I've agreed to that because I'm worried about "RIDDLER"'s backups running right, but what if this box is running a function, or algorithm that's needed? We can't afford to terminate that function until we know who uses it." RIDDLER was the company's email server, and it needed to have lots of speed on it's connection to enable a large amount of traffic.

"We can and we need to, the box is spamming our messaging..."

"You said it was only on two machines, though? How does that affect RIDDLER, say?"

"Just trust me, I've found worse than I've already explained to you."

"I *can't* trust you. We have to think of this from a management perspective. What breaks and who screams when we turn it off. If it does what you say it does, then guaranteed, someone will miss it! Now come on, let's go find it."

Wendel and Greggy made straight for the rack Evan was hiding behind. Evan frantically looked for a way to make himself scarce and ducked down another aisle between rack suites. He was desperate - he needed to find Steve's server before they did. Remembering his not-so-wholesome past, he grabbed at another console and made a connection to his home server outside the company. Like many computer engineers, he ran his own server at home, usually using it to help test connectivity and conditions getting back into the company from the outside world. 

From this server, he jumped to a free box in Sweden that he knew, then jumped to another box in the USA. From the USA box, he had a couple of stored files he could use to do very desperate things to get Wendel and Greggy's attention. Evan launched a DoS attack, or a Denial of Service attack using a script on "his" USA server. His target was his own company. Ideally, he wanted to make his company really notice the problem in an effort to call Wendel and Greggy away. After launching his nasty attack, he shut down the console, turned and hid in the corner of the room, where he wouldn't be seen.

About two minutes later, Wendel's phone rang. "Hello, Ben Wendel speaking... Oh, buggerit. Okay, I'll be right up... SOC? Oh, yeah, I've got Greggy with me here right now... No, I'm not sure where Evan is. Okay, talk in a few minutes..." 

Wendel hung up the phone in disgust. "Greggy, we're needed. We've lost our websites, the outside world seems to have slowed to a crawl..."

"Oh, no."

"Oh, yes, and we'll need to get that new kid trained up as quickly as possible..." Their voices faded suddenly as the door closed behind them. Evan logged back on to his USA server, and terminated the DoS attack script. "Right, that's got rid of you two, now let's find me Skynet..."

Evan picked up the mezzanine tile where he left off and began tracing the cable further and further, lifting tiles up as he made his slow painful way across the machine room's floor, tracing the cable along to the next one, lifting it up and replacing the former each time, and so on along the bank of racks - surely it would run up into a rack soon? - until he ran out of tiles to lift. The cable dove toward the concrete floor under the mezzanine, and then disappeared under a large thick plaster wall. 

"Well that's interesting..." Evan wondered if something was going to go right today.

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