Trekkie... good suggestion about thinking like a hacker, but, no offense intended or taken, I AM a good hacker. I've done all I can do to think about how I would hack in, and then to prevent those methods. This particular machine (orca) has been running for 3 years straight, and as you can probably see, it runs a LOT of services, and a LOT of people have fairly open access to it. I see evidence of hacking attempts almost daily, but this is the first time anyone's compromised the system itself. Still though, I think three years is a pretty good record for security on a system that deals out 10,000,000 files a month. And I have had other people try and hack in, the only one who succeeded got as far as guessing a password on an email-only account I used, but couldn't get farther than that. Anyone else is welcome to try, of course. The more heads thinking at it the better. I ask only two things if you game to try though. First, let me know so I don't panic. And two, don't damage anything major in the process. If you want to put a "hahaha" on the main page or something well... fine, but don't go and crash the machine. :-)
Now, as for more regular backups... Not as easy as it sounds. I keep pretty regular backups of my stuff and the systems stuff, but the problem is there are hundreds of users here, and that backup takes hours to do. I don't have room to keep multiple backups either. So when I back up, it overwrites the old backup. That's fine if everything is good when you do it, but often users don't spot a hack or a corrupted file right away, sometimes it can be weeks until they do. If I backed up every day, then by the time they come to me and ask, the backup itself contains only the corrupted file.
