Mysteriously Missing Main.asc

Question

Have any of you ever heard of a main.asc file being
"mysteriously" deleted from an application's directory?
I'm working on a client project that was being developed on
an in-house Fedora Core 5 server where I'd installed FMS. I
uploaded the client's video streams and coded main.asc's for two
separate applications. One of them, the larger of the two, had some
very important code in there that took me several all nighter's to
get right.
Long story short, the project got put on hold for a while and
now I'm taking another look at it, and moving it to a server live
on the internet. In doing so, I'm seeing that the main.asc file I
wrote for one of the projects is just plain GONE, like it never
existed. The other application is fine, untouched, but the more
important of the two has another strange twist: a directory called
"http" that I never created. Inside it are some streams (placed in
their own subdirectories) from the application's "streams"
directory that I never moved in there. And of course like I said,
the main.asc file is just plain gone.
Looking at /var/log/messages doesn't give me any information
(looks like the logs just rotated a day or two ago). Does anyone
have any ideas how I can find out:
a) how the hell this was deleted,
b) if there's a backup somewhere on the system (already tried
updatedb/locate main.asc, no help)
c) how to prevent it from happening again
Thanks in advance for any assistance you can provide.

Answer 1

I'm wondering if you've got some security holes there. Did
you look at any of the streams? Are they something that would have
been published by an authorized user, or does it appear that
someone has been adding their own streams and leeching your
bandwidth/connections?
The missing main.asc is what makes me suspicious. FMS
wouldn't remove its own files like that, and since other files are
where they should be, it sort of rules out the file missing as a
result of a system restore. Removing the main.asc would make the
application wide open to abuse, so if someone wanted to leech
effectively, removing the main.asc would be helpful to them.
What do your server logs (not the FMS logs, the network level
logs) tell you? Do you see anything odd? If someone broke into the
server and deleted your main.asc, it wouldn't show up in the FMS
logs.