Systems Administration on a Train

At around 8:00pm on Friday the pages started coming in.  A new automated SQL-Injection attack was bringing one of our servers to its knees.  The server wasn’t vulnerable to the attack, but the act of having to process so many invalid requests was putting significant load on the processor, and was filling ColdFusion’s running process limit, preventing legitimate requests from having time to run.

Ordinarily this becomes a night-killer for me.  I’m already out, on my way to dinner, and now I’ve got to go home to deal with this issue.  But tonight I get to try something different.  I’ve had an iPhone since around Christmas, and it’s a nice little device, despite a few shortcomings.  But what I’ve always wanted was a way to actively manage a server without the hassle of carrying around a laptop.  With the release of WinAdmin for the the iPhone, I’ve got it.

I was able to connect to our company’s VPN, remotely log into the desktop of the affected server, download and install the free version of ISAPI_ReWrite, and block any URL’s containing the offending SQL injection code.  The processor utilization dropped dramatically, regular pages were being served in a timely manner, and I was able to continue on to dinner.