“Maker of the Open Sauce Ubuntu software, Canonical had to shut
down five of the eight of its servers after receiving reports that
they were attacking other servers.“Knowing that there is nothing worse than a bunch of chavish
Linux servers looking for a rumble, or goading Windows computers
with calls of, ‘Come and have a go, if you’re hard enough,’
Canonical decided to pull the plug…”
[Editor’s Note: This afternoon, I received this statement
from Gerry Carr, Director of Marketing for Canonical.
-BKP]
“The first thing to say is that this is not a problem
with our production servers. These are the loco servers that we pay
for but that do not sit in our data centre. To be clear the
security in our data centre was in no way compromised by these
attacks. Any imputation, and there has been some, that this episode
has or had any bearing or on our enterprise readiness or the Ubuntu
downloads is so completely wide of the mark as to miss the point
entirely. It has nothing to do with downloaded copies of Ubuntu; it
is separate servers on a separate network in a separate
location.“So if that’s clear let’s put our hands up and say that these
servers have been poorly managed. In a project like Ubuntu there
are lots of areas where responsibilities fall between Canonical and
the community. Most of the time that is just as it should be.
Server management is maybe not one of them. As we are transparent
in the way we do everything, we’ve outlined what we are going to
do; either the loco servers come into our data centre and are
subject to our standard, rigorous security and management. Or they
sit completely outside of it and are run by the community.”