NEWS AND NOTES FROM ROOTSWEB THAT WAS THE WEEK THAT WAS (by Ellen Seebacher and Tim Pierce). On Saturday, we lost lists.rootsweb.com -- one of RootsWeb's two main mailing list servers -- when it was penetrated by a cracker. We were cracked through the inattentiveness of a user with privileged access to the machine, and will be more careful about granting direct access to RootsWeb servers in future. There is no sensitive or private data on this machine, only mailing list archives, so no one's privacy was compromised. However, the individual who entered the system wiped out two directories essential to running the machine ("/etc" and "/var/log"), which meant that to make the machine usable again we'd need to reinstall part of it from scratch. Brian Leverich worked through the weekend to rebuild the server and reinstall the operating system, but the process did not go smoothly; mysterious hardware troubles kept cropping up. While wrestling with these problems he decided to use the "down time" to good advantage by replacing the old machine, a Pentium Pro 200 with slow 60-nanosecond EDO memory, with a Pentium II 400 with fast 6-nanosecond SDRAM memory, estimated to improve performance by a factor of 2-6. Dr. Leverich assembled the new server over Saturday night and Sunday. On Monday, Tim Pierce and Randy Winch went over the operating system painstakingly, file by file, to ensure that the intruder left behind no back doors or Trojan horses. On Monday night, Tim and Karen Isaacson rebuilt the missing /etc directory, from memory and a little detective work. By late Monday night, the new server had begun processing the backlogged mail that had accumulated over the weekend. Fortunately, the extra work on the new server paid off: the megabytes of backed-up mail that would have taken the old machine days to process were finished off by the new system in about 12 hours. So although our down time was about a day and a half longer than we expected, the result is a RootsWeb that's faster, more efficient and better equipped to serve the needs of Internet genealogists. Thanks to all for your patience while we recovered from this disaster. We are especially grateful to RootsWeb's Members, Sponsors, Donors, and Patrons, who have collectively made it possible for us not only to repair the crippled operating system, but also to increase the server's capacity so everyone benefits.