Tag Archives: hosting

My Own Private Wikileaks

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Carson wants his pose pack

Would he look more scary, or less, with a turbin?

Here’s a quick crash course in “How to be just a bit nerdier” or “Why the government can’t put Wikileaks back in the box.”

I used to frequently use the phrase “DNS is magic” when working tech support. It’s not. It’s really like visiting a library.

What is DNS?

DNS stands for Domain Name System and it’s what translates a website name, bradleyrobb.net or google.com, into the IP address of a server. It’s part gopher and part translator, which basically makes it the white pages of the internet.

A quick “how it works”

When you type my web address, www.bradleyrobb.net, into your browser your browser queries a series of servers by reading my address in reverse order. First it asks for the .net sites, then for the bradleyrobb sites within the .net sphere, and finally for the www location within the bradleyrobb sphere.

Each search gets smaller. But, like Porter in Payback, you go high enough and eventually you to get to one number – the afore mentioned IP address. Everything that happens beyond that is a communication between your computer and my server.

Here’s where things get fun

Since I own the bradleyrobb.net sphere, I control everything beneath it. Sure, right now you’re on the www subdomain, but that is just one of an infinite number of potential subdomains. And on those infinite subdomains I could put anything I want to put there, as long as I know the IP address of what I want to point you to.

They don’t even need to be on my server. They don’t even need to be…my website.

Since the company which was hosting the wikileaks.org domain name decided (conviently) that the name wikileaks.org could no longer be hosted on their system, Wikileaks has been scrambling to come up with new domain names, their primary .org is down, but a mirrored site (wikileaks.ch who’s .ch is controlled by servers in Switzerland) is still up.

But know you what else is up? wikileaks.bradleyrobb.net

It took me less than 3 minutes to create my own wikileaks subdomain. It wouldn’t take you any longer.

That’s the problem with digital information – it can be replicated infinitely with almost zero effort. Various governments can keep going after wikileaks by pressuring the domain name registrars (the people who maintain the DNS records) and the hosting companies (way to bow down Amazon), but the information can just as easily be replicated elsewhere.

It’s a reactive game, and those…those always end badly. Just ask the RIAA. Just ask Lars Ulrich. Striking Napster from the face of the Earth really stopped piracy, didn’t it?

See for yourself

If you own your own domain name, even if you’re a web novice, here’s how easy it is to setup a subdomain to wikileaks:

Open your DNS editing tool.

Create a new A record.

Name the record anything you want.

In the value field, put the IP address: 213.251.145.96

It’ll take a few minutes for your DNS settings to propagate through your server, but that’s the magic part.

Well that was a little drama

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Thought I had lost the databases for not only this, but also the subter.com. Both sites were throwing a “error connecting to database” message. My first thought was to check the status message displayed on my host’s webpage and I noticed that two different file server clusters were having “issues” recently and figured that my problems were probably related to that.

They weren’t.

I waited a bit, hoping the problem would resolve itself. It didn’t. I sent in a support ticket, which is usually enough to get any issue resolved with my hosts. I received no response. I came into work this morning and saw that both this site and subter were both still down and I had yet to hear back from my hosts. So, I figured, I worked tech support at a web hosting company for several months, I’m a fairly competent guy, I’ll do it myself.

The first thing you learn when working tech support is that the vast majority of mistakes are user error. The acronym frequently thrown around is PEBKAC (Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair), and you can usually diagnose the PEBKAC calls within the first 15 seconds of the conversation.

If you know, you know.

If you know, you know.

I sat down and started thinking about everything that I’d done server-side recently, to try and determine what I possibly could have screwed up. The only thing that came to mind was that I had recently removed a website that I’d been hosting for some other people. Turns out, the database server was lumped under that name.

My first fear was that in using the auto removal tool for that website, I had taken out not only the database for this site (no big loss, not much here) but also the database for subter (which has quite a bit of quality writing on it). I jumped into the database server and lo, the databases were still there. It wasn’t my fault, or so it seemed.

I started banging out a rather angry email to my hosts about how a pair of my websites had been offline for close to 60 hours now when I started thinking about DNS. You see, I started this saying at the hosting company I worked for, “DNS is magic.” The saying stuck because, for all intents and purposes, it is. The process is completely transparent to not only the end user, but frequently the users in the middle. I realized that the hostname for my sites’ respective databases included the domain name that I had recently stopped hosting. Common sense snuck in – if I were a host, and someone stopped hosting a domain with me, I’d strip that domain name from the local DNS system instantly.

I found a second database hostname for my websites, chanced them out in the CMS’s configuration file and a chorus of angels opened up above.

The sites were saved…and then the squirrels attacked.