Maru's Mun Journal

Last night, poor bigfluffball couldn't get onto LJ at all, as she told me via IM; she finally went offline, frustrated, in the hope it would work in the morning.

Now it is morning, I turn on my computer, can't get on LJ either! I asked moons_storm, and she says she can.

Hmmmm.

This partial nonexistence of LJ, combined with the fact that the 404 comes suspiciously fast, suggested to me that it's a DNS problem. If Alice's domain name look-up tells my computer that LJ doesn't exist, of course my computer believes her.

So, switched to OpenDNS.

Bingo!! LJ exists again.

So, logical conclusion: the mega-wankers* that are after one certain blogger have started feedingthe DNS system false information about LJ (and Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, presumably) which starts spreading these dark spots in the internet from which these services can't be reached. DNS servers aren't administered centrally; instead, they keep talking to each other, exchanging current lookup tables. After you switch a domain name from one version of a web site to another when you go live with an overhaul, it always takes a few hours until everybody you want to see the new version can get there, because the DNS information, as provided by your web hoster, takes time to disseminate.

This is what's happening with the apparent total LJ outages. I'll stick to OpenDNS for the time being, and recommend that anybody for whom LJ disappears apparently completely (while there are still people for whom it works, plus the notable speed to the appearance of the 'site not found' page) should do that as well**. DNS servers is all that this commercial company ever does, so they'll be damn careful whose lookup tables they allow their servers to use; and the attacks on LJ, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are well known and in the mainstream news.

* And it's really just one giant case of wank! Somebody who can afford to pay a botnet, or whose buddy runs a botnet that's not too busy due to the crisis, it being summer holiday time, etc., and has it out for that one bloke from Georgia, used that botnet to simply silence the channels he is using. It's part of the larger Russian-Georgian wank, of course, and I'm looking forward something fierce to feed my take on this into the Georgian forum and messageboard scene via the colleague with the Georgian wife on Monday; but basically, this is classic wank shooting cannons at sparrows, aimed ultimately at one person. It shall go down in history as the Largest LJ Wank Ever!

** Rule of thumb: anybody able to comprehend the very simple instructions on the OpenDNS site is able to use the service. Whoever finds the idea scary and needs help for it, shouldn't.