HELP HELP HELP!

[jfreeman at gmail.com (jsf)]

I used to live in Boston, in Roslindale.  I now live in Westchester, NY.

I still have a house (it's rented) in Roslindale.  I maintain an old
HP Pavilion there, running, of all things, RH 6.2.  I installed
apt-get on the box and make an effort to keep it secured (within my
feeble abilities.).

The network at the house consists of an ISDN router/modem, the RH box
(known as monica.threeofus.com) and a linksys base station.

monica.threeofus.com has the following processes running on it:

1) sendmail (for a number of domains including monica.threeofus.com)

2) dns (bind/named)  (ditto)

3) http  (ditto again)

Tonight, my wife was complaining that she couldn't get her mail.. I
checked and her laptop said that there was a pre-existing process that
was preventing her from getting her mail.. her mail was locked...

That seemed strange...

I started looking in /var/log/messages and saw that passwords had
recently been changed for users mail and adm and I forget whoelse.. it
was strange looking..

Anyway.... I suspected trouble but didn't start panicking... just as a
precaution, I changed the root password... I rebooted the machine..
anyway.. long story short, next thing I knew, I couldn't even ssh into
the box, and when I called my tenant to look at the console, they
couldn't even get a login prompt... someone had REALLY completely
taken over the machine, or, otherwise, it was failing in some kind of
catastrophic way on its own.

Even if I *had* time to drive up to Boston, I wouldn't be able to to
much more than repartition the drives, and reinstall the OS and start
from scratch...

I'm hoping that someone reading this would be willing, for not TOO
much money, to drive to Roslindale and either pick up the machine or
work on it there... I don't have any backup(s) of that machine ... so
i'd like to grab some config. files/information off of it so it's
fairly easy to re-set-up... with a new OS (Debian stable or
something...)...

Can anyone help me out here?   I really need to have that machine up,
not only for me, but also for my tenants so that the wireless works...
(long story..)

TIA to anyone who'll call me and offer to help:  try 914 509 4049
first, then try 347 392 2560

Thanks!

J.