1/4/2000 to 1/4/2025: the "creative" stuff

One notable thing I did in my first 25 years was in answer to an odd request I got from a customer of a customer (don't ask).

This particular organization had lost control of their own authoritative DNS (public DNS) and needed a hand to recover the zone hosted there. Unfortunately this was the only DNS so taking it down to mount the disk would have resulted in unacceptable downtime and there was also the risk that the disk had been encrypted (they were not sure). So many things were unknown about this server that even a reboot was considered risky.

So, what we ended up doing instead was mirroring the network traffic on the switch to a new server, run tcpdump on all DNS traffic for a couple of weeks, and then through a series of specially crafted tshark + awk commands we rebuilt the entire zone file (which was not very large, thankfully).

We reviewed the zone file with the customer, loaded into a new server and then swapped it in while keeping the old system running.

I never heard from them again.

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