What is Hackers' Pub?

Hackers' Pub is a place for software engineers to share their knowledge and experience with each other. It's also an ActivityPub-enabled social network, so you can follow your favorite hackers in the fediverse and get their latest posts in your feed.

0
0
0
0
1
0
0
0

A few days ago, a client’s data center (well, actually a server room) "vanished" overnight. My monitoring showed that all devices were unreachable. Not even the ISP routers responded, so I assumed a sudden connectivity drop. The strange part? Not even via 4G.

I then suspected a power failure, but the UPS should have sent an alert.

The office was closed for the holidays, but I contacted the IT manager anyway. He was home sick with a serious family issue, but he got moving.

To make a long story short: the company deals in gold and precious metals. They have an underground bunker with two-meter thick walls. They were targeted by a professional gang. They used a tactic seen in similar hits: they identify the main power line, tamper with it at night, and send a massive voltage spike through it.

The goal is to fry all alarm and surveillance systems. Even if battery-backed, they rarely survive a surge like that. Thieves count on the fact that during holidays, owners are away and fried systems can't send alerts. Monitoring companies often have reduced staff and might not notice the "silence" immediately.

That is exactly what happened here. But there is a "but": they didn't account for my Uptime Kuma instance monitoring their MikroTik router, installed just weeks ago. Since it is an external check, it flagged the lack of response from all IPs without needing an internal alert to be triggered from the inside.

The team rushed to the site and found the mess. Luckily, they found an emergency electrical crew to bypass the damage and restore the cameras and alarms. They swapped the fried server UPS with a spare and everything came back up.

The police warned that the chances of the crew returning the next night to "finish" the job were high, though seeing the systems back online would likely make them move on. They also warned that thieves sometimes break in just to destroy servers to wipe any video evidence.

Nothing happened in the end. But in the meantime, I had to sync all their data off-site (thankfully they have dual 1Gbps FTTH), set up an emergency cluster, and ensure everything was redundant.

Never rely only on internal monitoring. Never.

@stefanoStefano Marinelli that advice also applies to monitoring scheduled backup jobs (or any other automated process). I use a service that emails me if I don't hit a specific URL roughly every 24 hours, and I hit that at the end of my backup job if it was successful.

Better than finding out the hard way at some point in the future that something happened with my backup job, preventing it from running for the last month.

0
2
1
0
0
1
1
0
1
0

Wednesday, January 7, 2026

- Killing of Renee Good: 291 revisions en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Killing_
- 2026 United States strikes in Venezuela: 157 revisions en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2026_Uni
- Planning of the September 11 attacks: 134 revisions en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planning
- 2025–2026 Iranian protests: 134 revisions en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2025%E2%
- List of…

0
0

The European Commission has opened a "call for evidence" to help shape its European Open Digital Ecosystem Strategy. The commission is looking to reduce its dependence on software from non-EU countries:

lwn.net/Articles/1053107/

0
1
0

1日のタスクが終わって、風呂も入って、いざベッドに横たわった時、マットレスが非常に柔らかいということのありがたさよ​:arigatexe__ooo:

1

**Last call to apply to Aurora Sprint **🌌

Taking place February 23rd to 27th, the week before Planet Nix, the theme of Aurora Sprint is making Nix the perfect platform to develop and build embedded systems.

Aurora Sprint is hosted by Genki and will take place at its downtown Reykjavík office. There will be opportunities to go aurora hunting, hiking, and experience Icelandic swimming pools and cuisine. Seats are limited. Application deadline is January 11th. Apply here: aurorasprint.com/

0
2
0
1
0
0
0
0
1
3
0
0
0
0
1
1
0
0
0
0
0

seems like on ios, there’s a regression: if you go from feed to profile, back swipe no longer works reliably if you start it from a post. also quote embeds seem to maybe interfere with back swipe as well

0
0
0
0
0
1
1
0
0
0
0