The whitest hat

[ciphergoth]

Part of my Christmas entertainment has been an effort to hack into my own box. SSH won't start, so we have to break in to reconfigure it to give us a way to log in again.

Blah...

Update 1:52am: All fixed now. I rule.

Comments

[babysimon]

How?

[ciphergoth.livejournal.com]

We still had FTP working, and I have "sudo" access. So I made a script that knew my password and sudo'd to root to re-execute itself, then switched on telnet and opened up the right hole in the firewall. This script I FTPd over, then set up a "procmail" recipe to run it, then sent myself mail with the magic subject line ("arsefardle") to run the script. Then telnetted in and fixed SSH, and switched telnet and my script off again. Then changed my password...

Oh, and the script sent all its output to a text file in my web space, so I could find out what it was doing. You can read it: http://www.ciphergoth.org/rescue/didit.txt