A while back I wrote this , about an exceptioncreated by the cgi module when crackerssubmitted XML-RPC calls instead of form POSTs. It makes a great examplefor discussing the difference between 'secure systems' and 'resilientsystems'.

Put broadly, security is keeping people out, while resilience iskeeping operating when people attack you. The cgi module example shows that you can haveone without the other. Sometimes this may even be deliberate;an exceptionally paranoid system could shut itself down anytime it saw unexpected

We have some machines that are 'no user-operable parts inside'setups; as part of that, they have no user logins, just root . (Yes,yes, running as root all the time is bad, but on these boxes almostall we'd ever do with a plain login is su to root.)

I'm attuned to all of the regular hazards of this, but today Istumbled over a new one: how long it takes to notice that /var hadaccidentally wound up

This one is partly my fault, due to me inheriting responsibility formanaging DNS for this organization. (Needless to say it's fixed now,but it gives me a useful cautionary example.)

This won't be presented in illustrated form, because it's simplerto just explain the problem. All of this is for the domain transportationtomorrow.on.ca .

• according to the .ca nameservers, the nameservers for the domainare ns1.jpint.utoronto.ca and mto.jpint.utoronto