From the 13th to the 14th of August my Play Machine [1] was offline. There was a power failure for a few seconds and the machine didn’t boot correctly. As I had a lot of work to do I left it offline for a day before fixing it. The reason it didn’t boot was that due to an issue with the GRUB package it was trying to boot a non-Xen kernel with Xen, this would cause the Xen Dom0 load to abort and it would then reboot after 5 seconds – and automatically repeat the process. The problem is that update-grub in Lenny will generate boot entries for Xen kernels to boot without Xen and for non-Xen kernels to boot with Xen.
Two days ago someone launched a DOS attack on my Play Machine and I’ve only just put it back online. I’ve changed the ulimit settings a bit, that won’t make DOS attacks impossible, just force the attacker to use a little bit more effort.
You might be interested in:
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=402338