Hmmmm.....could it be a large scale conspiracy by the right wing corrupt press and nazi government to shut down the only free press out there?

could someone please post some plausable explaination for what happened to the 60 IMC's which were not operating today, as I am getting paranoid,

I guess your post is poking fun at my paranoia, which is fair enough, BUT these servers are located in 60 different countries and I can't think of a plausable explaination as to why they should all go down at once, then pop back into existence with no explaination whatsoever.

This afternoon when I tried www.intermedia.org it was gone.
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

no worries, no paranoia (yet...!), just techies doing maintenance work, apparently...
Rachel (1 of IMC UK)

Just to confirm, it was down in the US from 11pm EST to about 9:30am EST. I dunno if it was down all night. Probably not. But it was down for sure.

J.O.

This is the second time i posted this response the first it failed to appear, just checked some postings i made today in other IMC's and they failed to appear.
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.

When I found that I couldn't access the international site, or sf (the two I tried first) I tried some experiments:

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.

andi from the uk.techies here.

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