Team Coleman Fakes Website Crash

[kpete]

Team Coleman Fakes Website Crash
by
Aaron Landry


Today, Team Coleman’s blogger at MDE, Ryan Flynn, posted a tidbit today:

“THOUSANDS OF HITS CRASH COLEMAN WEBSITE”

ST PAUL – Information recently added to the Coleman for Senate website, whereby people can find out which Minnesota voters the Franken campaign is trying to disenfranchise, has resulted in the website being inundated by tens of thousands of hits today – temporarily crashing the website.

They’re completely lying. Here’s why:

1. colemanforsenate.com has handled much, much more traffic before. (Note that each “visitor” generates numerous “hits.”) Why is it a problem now?

2. Their website has been configured to point at the IP address “1.1.1.1,” which goes nowhere. This isn’t a mistake. They also set the “time to live” on that for only 600 seconds, which means when they choose to switch it back, most servers should only take 10 minutes to refresh. It’s an intentional move so they can manage their timing of the switchover. Most records like this have a much longer time to live. In short, they have configured their website to intentionally point at nothing. This does not happen by mistake and it is clear what they are doing. Reporters: ask any IT professional.



3. It’s extremely fishy that Ryan Flynn is posting what appears to be an internal administrative IP address instead of the Coleman for Senate website. On the post on MDE, click on that Coleman for Senate link. It goes here:

http://65.121.0.101/exchweb/bin/redir.asp?URL=http://www.colemanforsenate.com/

more at:
http://mnpublius.com/2009/01/team-coleman-fakes-website-crash/
http://minnesotaindependent.com/24761/disenfranchised-voters-crash-colemans-site-unlikely-says-blogger

[sakabatou]

1. What a brat Coleman is

[nadinbrzezinski]

2. SCUM

[SharonAnn]

3. But why? I don't understand why?

[Fuzz]

6. Attention whore.

[tanyev]

8. To set up a pretext that "the people of Minnesota are clamoring for justice to be done"

yadda, yadda, yadda...?

[crikkett]

4. Maybe the press release is to cover up the fact that he got turned off for

lack of payment?

No, that's unlikely.

[Cronus Protagonist]

5. Following the pristine example of Lieberman

Now he gets to cast doubt upon his opponent, he gets to claim his information is in great demand and he gets media attention. Not bad for a couple of minutes admin work.

[Trekologer]

7. I posted this in a different thread earlier today

A "crash" doesn't do that. Someone had to change the DNS entry. DNS (domain name service) is what is used to convert domain names (such as democraticunderground.com) into their actual internet IP addresses, which is a 32 bit number (four octets binary 00000000 through 11111111 which is decimal 0-255 with each separated by periods), for example 2.3.4.5.

The address 1.1.1.1 which technically valid doesn't go anywhere. The link in the OP says that the name used to resolve to 208.42.168.197. This server is up (try it yourself at http://208.42.168.197 ). You'll get a directory listing of / (the root directory) containing svnindex.css and svnindex.xsl. There is no actual content meaning someone removed it. It also reports that the server is Apache 2.2.8 (the de-facto open-source webbrowser) running on Ubunutu (a popular linux distribution) with PHP 5.2 (a programming language commonly used for dynamic web content), Ruby (another programming language) and SSL (the secure socket layer) plugins enabled. The interesting thing is that if you select to use a secure connection for the server (https://208.42.168.197 ) and accept the security certificate (most web browsers will say there is a problem with the certificate because you requested https://208.42.168.197 and the certificate is for https://www.colemanforsenate.com ) the page will load, albeit slowly (this is due to parts of the page such as images being located at https://www.colemanforsenate.com, which doesn't resolve to the "real" IP address and the web browser trying to download each and having them timeout).

No, this wasn't a website "crash". It was taken down on purpose (and rather sloppily).

[chollybocker]

9. "Website Crash"

always the first thing incompetent people blame when they fuck up.