What happened?
bill jones | 26.11.2001 19:27
bill jones
A network of individuals, independent and alternative media activists and organisations, offering grassroots, non-corporate, non-commercial coverage of important social and political issues.
bill jones | 26.11.2001 19:27
bill jones
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Comments
Hide the following 9 comments
HINTS OF THE X-FILES, EH?
26.11.2001 19:34
mULDER
I hope not
26.11.2001 20:19
a nother
well Mr mULDER
26.11.2001 20:24
scared
Blackout
26.11.2001 20:26
Tried others. Gone. For about 8-10 hours.
Found Adelaide. Through there I found out that Finland. Norway, Israel and possibly Germany were still up.
Have been posting twice on this on www.indymedia.org (short question on what happened) and after a few minutes the post was gone again.
Thanks
5
sorted
26.11.2001 20:28
Rachel (1 of IMC UK)
bod
Down in US too
26.11.2001 20:29
J.O.
Jackie O
reponse to bod
26.11.2001 20:45
maintainence work in 60 countries on the same day? and the techied did'nt think we would get paranoid? how about a little advance warning?
and why dont you post your comment on the central colounm if you are part of IMC? i am not the only paranoid nut out there.
still paranoid
There's more to it
26.11.2001 21:26
Attempting to DNS the indymedia.org domain failed, returning a "no DNS, server does not exist" message.
A DNS request for phillyimc.org, which I know has an independent server, worked, but although pings to that IP worked, trying to fetch the page didn't. About 15 minutes later, phillyimc.org stopped responding to pings.
There are only a few imc's that actually have independent servers; the majority (including U.K.) are served from seattle by the same server: stallman.indymedia.org
Do a DNS inquiry and you'll see that most indymedia sites share the same IP address.
Even though some imc's have their own IP, like LA and San Francisco, the fact that they share the domain name indymedia.org meant that they couldn't be reached unless you knew the IP address, since it was impossible to resolve any domain name ending in indymedia.org.
So, I have to wonder. Although maintenance in Seattle could easily disable a number of IMC sites, I can't see why the DNS entry should have disappeared at the same time.
So, although I'm not a networking maven, I'm still somewhat suspicious about this. I hope the techies post an explanation soon.
In the meantime, I'm making a list of imc IPs, so that if the DNS entry disappears again I can try to reach the servers directly.
The Shnoz
blackout was due to maintenance on stallman
26.11.2001 22:46
blackout was due to maintenance on stallman
well it looks like it was a glitch actually. i personally would not mulder yet even though i was pissed off myself that there was no warning at all. there was a point where i could not even reach protest.net or riseup.net where 'outsourced' functionality of indymedia are run, so i got a bit paranoid myself.
when i realised all the indies were down i rerouted the uk site to our uk fallback server this afternoon with an explanation that the us servers are down. we've bought www.indymedia.org.uk and have configured it here in the uk as a fallback server in case things go wrong but there is no database running and that's why there was no newswire nor upload facilities. normally http://www.indymedia.org.uk redirects to http://uk.indymedia.org so you probably haven't ever seen this active.
no 'official global tech' explanation has been given yet (even tho there are postings on the global tech list, see http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/public/imc-tech/2001-November/006193.html - i personally think the blackout was due to someone installing openssh on stallman on saturday late (seattle time) and something must have gone wrong afterwards. i include a graphic of the load on stallman of the last 24 hours, and significantly there was a timeout sunday 5.30 - 10.30 pm seattle time (which can be explained by installing openssh); but then stallman went down again 2.30 - 9.45 am today (seattle time again). so i suppose something must have screwed up - wouldn't be the first time. when i was able to reconnect to stallman again there were heavy problems with the upload directory nearly full (there were only 62MB free left). i've poked around a bit on the uk directory and deleted double video uploads so now were running with 190 MB free - still not enough but it saves us for the time being.
i'm not sure where exactly the DNS are resolved but it must be on stallman otherwise it wouldn't affect the resolving. spot on, The Shnoz. nearly all indy sites are indeed on stallman and were consequently down. i can't explain why http://www.phillyimc.org would timeout on ping though. http://www.indymedia.de was fine.
here a quick list of the independent servers i know about:
http://stallman.indymedia.org 216.231.32.98
http://la.indymedia.org 64.27.16.10
http://www.indymedia.org.uk 213.55.14.32
http://www.indymedia.de 134.102.6.205
http://www.phillyimc.org 207.8.152.234
clearly a reason to divert to more servers! anyone interested in helping subscribe to the uk-tech list please! http://lists.indymedia.org/mailman/listinfo/imc-uk-tech
andi
e-mail: andi@syndicate.org.uk