This story needs to be told to everyone, whenever there’s something not working right on your servers or computers, please get a geek/nerd to study the situation first - BEFORE you send an email to the maker of your operating system, accuse them of hacking you and threaten to call the police.

The city manager Oklahoma’s Tuttle city did just that when four of his computers showed the Apache’s web server default page when he tried to access his town’s website. Well - actually the page itself explained what it is about but I guess when he didn’t see his town’s default page, all those blood draining out from his brain made his vision blurry.

For those in the dark what’s happening. Apache is a web server and when you see the default page, that means the web server has just been (re)-installed and the associated domain name has not been correctly pointed to display the right page.

After accusing CentOS of trying to hack his servers, he then threatened to call the FBI if the page is not reverted back within 12 hours. He also has this to say :

“I am computer literate! I have 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation. Now, can you tell me how to remove ‘your software’ that you acknowledge you provided free of charge? I consider this ‘hacking.’”

Hmmm I guess 22 years of computer systems is not enough to know about these internet and server-thingy huh?

So what happens now?

Well he is the laughing stock of techies and now he is urging the online news site that reported this story to stop people from sending him email - which of course is impossible because the nerds are sending the emails, not from the news site. This request was even made a follow-up news story.

Links :
Oklahoma city threatens to call FBI over ‘renegade’ Linux maker
Oklahoma man asks Reg to turn off the internet
Full Email Correspondence on the Incident