Vous trouverez dans ce chapitre une anecdote ou histoire courte par jour de la semaine.
In the early days of Internet, one of our clients, an artist, called to announce a show on the week-end. He was proud of the show and of all his new artwork, which would be mostly wet to the touch, but it's not called a vernissage for nothing. He had many great new pictures and they needed to be on the website before the show.
"Before the show? That's in two days !"
"Yes and we need to change the look of the website as well, I started a new style!"
After a flood of photos and a late evening, we were nearly done a few hours before the show opened Friday afternoon. Douglas received a delivery of a dishwasher and decided to install it in his apartment on the same floor as the office, if I could work on the laptop on his kitchen table. So he could give instructions on the layout and colour scheme whenever I needed them.
We worked along happily each on his task, when we got the first phone call:
"The website is offline and I will have clients soon! I need it to work now!!!"
It was one of the first big DOS attacks and the provider's servers started to go offline. We copied his website on a private server and another space and gave him those addresses.
A while later, Douglas left his computer and returned to his installation. The dishwasher was installed, a new water tap as well and everything looked fine. There was just one concern:
"There is a gap between the end of the cabinet row and the wall, and if someone decides to climb onto the dishwasher, it might keel over. I will fix it to the wall and put a small shelf into the gap."
"Who would climb on top of a dishwasher?"
"You never know. A friend might bring kids. An artist. The guy checking the gas heater."
At the same time, we got the next panicked call, as the new addresses for the website were offline as well. The attack had spread and after the common hosting space, the private servers were going offline, even the own servers of the provider's website. They had installed a hotline, but the staff had no information either.
After the next call from the artist detailing his whole investment into canvas, paint and exhibition space, I decided to put a copy of the website on a space offered by the phone provider with the office landline. We had never used it, but it would at least allow the artist to show his website during the show. I gave him the address, to try a bit later. Whilst I was fully concentrated on finding out how to use that space, Douglas decided that he would just finish his shelf whilst I copied the files.
I was sitting in one of his deep chairs, crouched over the macbook, about 2,5 m away from the wall he attacked with a drill, trying to block out the noise and understand the configuration instructions. When I work, nearly nothing can distract me. Nearly nothing. A water cannon can.
A few things happened simultaneously: Douglas hit a lead pipe with his drill. Every single gas, water and electricity line in this house was visible, nobody knew that they had buried one single line in a wall a century ago. Douglas found it and it blew his drill back and a jet of water crossed the kitchen. It reached my glasses, I dived out backwards from the chair, grabbing and closing the macbook, turning and jumping with the macbook shielded by my body in direction of the next room. 3 steps on, I dumped it on a couch, dry. My hair was wet, drops running along my nose, the kitchen was swimming in water, Douglas tried to press a kitchen towel against the hole, but the pressure was too high to close the hole. The breach was before the main tap of the apartment, which he had closed during his installation work.
I run down to ask the owner in the apartment below, where the interruptors for the house were. He hurried down with me and we closed the levers. When I reached the second floor again, Douglas was shovelling water into a bucket. We worked along in a hurry and could keep it from reaching the hallway and the office, but there was no way keeping it from reaching the apartment underneath. The ceiling downstairs was wet. Again.
That was the lucky part of the calamity: Douglas had had to change his kitchen, because the owner had caused a flooding in Douglas' place and it had already rained downstairs. Douglas new kitchen cabinets had high metal legs and the painters had not yet started downstairs.
We found a plumber willing to come the same afternoon, as the whole house was without water now. He knocked downstairs, but took some time to reach the second floor:
"The door code did not work any more. Some water must have reached the installation. The owner let me in and I made him a deal to install a new code lock. As I'm already coming for the pipes, I don't charge him much for that. He was happy about it."
Whilst he worked, we got two more calls, that the website was working on the phone line hosting space and then that it was no longer working. The attack peaked on Saturday morning, the artist had four working websites at noon and Douglas a very clean kitchen floor.