3 ms·

Sure, happens now and then. I work at an ISP / housing / colocation company, and occasionally hardware goes missing (nobody knows where it is anymore, it's not

Sure, happens now and then. I work at an ISP / housing / colocation company, and occasionally hardware goes missing (nobody knows where it is anymore, it's not where it's supposed to be). Maybe some of them are broken, some might be stolen, but I'm fairly sure others are still running, not serving any purpose. And from time to time we stumble over some virtual machine (or even phyiscal server) where nobody knows anymore what it's supposed to do; the standard procedure seems to be firewall it off, wait for a few weeks or months to see if anybody complains, and if not, shut it down, maybe archive it.

simon_vetter 11y ago
Same experience here. Servers get ordered, racked, provisioned and left powered on waiting for a sysadmin to make use of them... which quite often doesn't ever happen, because team priorities change over time, people move on/get fired, entities go through reorgs, etc. They sit there idling and unattended, burning power and disks, until some script kiddie finds whatever default root password was used or how to exploit some random apache/ssh flaw. At that point the possibilities are endless: bitcoin miners are quite unnoticeable in most environments, but DDOS/spam zombies, proxies, bittorrent seedboxes, botnet C&C, "warez" and http servers serving drive by exploits are fairly common. Protip: ask your datacenter provider to power your servers down (be it VMs or dedicated gear) after racking them up. Powering them back up when you really need them will only take you a minute and you'll save big on power, bandwith, security and peace of mind.