Well, I've picked up the habit from my computer science teacher of naming
variables and files things like doofus, fool, etc. The project I was working
on was a program that would download and replace itself as an upgrade. It
never worked because java would always change a few characters, but I guess
something downloaded a lot. I may have also created a disk image I was using
for something, and then forgot to delete it. I tried to open it with nano,
but it crashed the computer, which would make this the first time. I have a
gig of RAM, and that file was on a 30 gig partition, so I don't even want to
know what happened when nano tried to read the entire file into RAM. I did
shutdown -HF now at one point and fsck checked out fine. I'll have to do
that again, considering I just deleted a several gig file.

Thanks,
-Peter

On 8/16/06, Duncan <1i5t5.duncan@cox.net> wrote:
>
> "Peter Davoust" <worldgnat@gmail.com> posted
> 7c08b4dd0608150751o418c99e5gcbae8cc9a96460ad@mail.gmail.com, excerpted
> below, on  Tue, 15 Aug 2006 14:51:51 +0000:
>
> > Ok, so I had a 5 gig disk image I was using for a guest OS. I deleted it
> > and it brought be down to about 93% usage, and gave me back KDE. Then I
> > did a series of du -s /* etc, which took me to a directory I created for
> > a Java application I'm writing. Somehow, a file called fool was created,
> > and it was enourmous. I deleted it and it brought me down to 22% usage.
> > Is that insane or what? I guess the file was appropriately named.....
>
> Let's see... 5 gig = 7%, 1.4% per gig.  93%-22%=71%  71/1.4=...  about 50
> gigs.  A 50 gig "fool" file!  (This assumes you didn't delete some other
> small stuff you failed to mention.)  Yeah, appropriately named, I'd say.
>
> Did you check the contents of the thing to see what in the world (um..
> what on the disk :) it was?  Maybe the creation/modification times,
> perhaps in comparison to other files?
>
> That name is ... strange... to say the least.  Going just on the name, and
> the fact that it grew so huge, the possibility that immediately came to my
> mind was a cracker.  Following the thought, the file would have been put
> there as a DoS, possibly because the cracker couldn't get access to
> anything else but could create a huge file as a disruption, or perhaps
> there was a trojan plant and it was an activity log the cracker planned on
> harvesting at some point for password hints or personal details.
>
> Hopefully it's nothing of the sort, but the name... f001d might have been
> a bit more suspicious, but not by much.  Of course, I haven't done Java
> since about time I switched from MSWormOS as it's proprietary/slaveryware
> if you are using Sun or Blackdown, and somewhat limited at present with
> the Freedomware alternatives, and I don't know what you are developing, so
> for all I know, "fool" was a legit file.  However, it still /sounds/
> suspicious.  I'd not be comfortable until I knew exactly why it was there,
> or at least until I had done a bit of forensics on my system and could be
> relatively sure I hadn't been compromised.
>
> Of course, one other possibility is a filesystem gone badly wrong, a small
> file and a file system accident, that an fsck on reboot reconstructed as
> using all the free space on the entire partition!  That would account for
> the size, but not for the name, which would still need some sort of
> explanation.
>
> --
> Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
> "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
> and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman
>
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