June 9, 2009 @ 8:41 am Just read a link on WHT to this article on India Times — Tecie hangs himself in HSR Layout:
On Monday morning, software company owner K T Ligesh, 32, was found hanging in his house.
He was also deeply upset his company, Lx Labs, in HSR Layout, 6th Sector, had recently lost a project to another company…
Any loss of life is sad. This guy built HyperVM — the virtualization control panel for both OpenVZ and Xen — and most importantly many low end box providers, i.e. those that have been listed under this blog, are using his software (as it costs them only 50 cents/VPS I heard, comparing to many times more Parallels charge for Virtuozzo). That basically puts HyperVM in limbo — which means there will actually have big impact on budget VPS providers. Who will take control of the source code? Or is there an alternative?
My condolences to his family.
By the way, he was an Anti-Christ, so sad. Giving their code to the open source community (GPLed), that is a good start, many people around the world will thank, especially some good low end box providers.
From the description of his personal life (wanting to kill God, being an anti-Christ, having no/few friends, living along, etc) does indicate that a little bit help might be able to prevent this disaster. There’s usually cure for depression in many cases, either with medical treatment or counselling.
I guess at the end of the day opening the source up to let the code to continue to live would be the best option.
@xisxon its not likely that it will be GPLed. According to the remaining employee, S. Bhargava, he said he will try to keep the company and the products going. The full quote is on my site.
@LowEndAdmin: I am paranoid now. Is it possible to backup a Xen VM without hypervisor access?
@Codexon — you can still rsync the entire content to an off-site backup (i.e. your own computer on a broadband connection for example).
“I personally am trying NOT to let the products Kloxo and HyperVM die.”
Open Source is an option if you let your code to the community-
“please avoid using them till we get more information about the future of Lxlabs.”
Yes, when you become “open”, that is the future of LxLabs-
…community, hackers and experts are waiting, to analyze, to improve, we welcome you to join, are you ready, eh? :D
@xisxon: the problem is that there are open source control panels that still suck.
@LowEndAdmin: that was what I was thinking, I just hoped there was an easier way like rsyncing the Xen snapshots.
Do note that Sunday saw a medium-sized provider (vaserv.com, which runs fsckvps.com) nearly wiped out, almost certainly because of vulnerabilities in HyperVM that allegedly had been reported to LxLabs a week or more ago, but had not been fixed in the days-old update nor reported to customers.
@Codexon: Oh, still suck? Well, thats embarassing, hehe :D
@Isaac: This was due to some lazy and insecure password by their management. However, a couple of other(small) providers were hacked but they were not wiped out at all.
@Tickedon: I assume you are basing your statement on the posting on some of the forums which claims to be from the hacker. I haven’t seen anything to demonstrate that the post from the alleged hacker was actually authentic. Do you have any sort of authentic proof that VAServ was negligent, or are you just tossing out something that you read somewhere? What I’m getting at here, is that it’s a pretty serious allegation you’re making. I think the responsible thing to do is for those of us who don’t actually WORK for VAServ to keep our mouths shut, since we don’t really have any way to prove that anyone there was at fault. They’ve actually been pretty good about trying to keep their customers informed.
Besides all that, I believe this was intended to be a thread to say farewell to Ligesh, not to kick a longtime VPS provider while they’re down.
Is there a vulnerability in lxadmin panel too? I had no clue how to setup a server until I found lxlabs and their panel. Didn’t know that the CEO was an ‘anti-Christ’ – amazing stuff, because the church sites run fine on his product. It’s all too bad he had to kill himself, but that’s how life ends sometime.
Does anyone know if there will be an update to lxadmin panel, like it used to be?