OathKeepers sites down - False Alarm

[jgalt]

EDIT: Thanks to some input from mrp ... it appears like this may have been the result of a hardware failure at a service provider in Utah. The nature and timing of the outage kinda made me poop myself a little, and I may have jumped the gun on assuming nefarious intent.

Never fear - the nefarious intent is still there, it just doesn't seem to have had anything to do with this issue...

[Randygmn]

Got an email from OathKeepers. Edited and updated first post with the info. I'm glad it turned out to just be a hardware issue than, well, what I was thinking it was.

Hmm. I wonder why they didn't respond to mine?

[jshuberg]

Thinking about this, if someone did want to take down their site, it would appear less suspicious to have a broader 'failure' than one specific .org.

Yeah, that thought actually crossed my mind, but once the outage was identified it did start to look more like a highly coincidental occurrence. I still don't understand how a single hardware failure could disrupt all traffic to two different data centers, but I guess that doesn't really matter.

Given that it did go down in an unusual way, within an hour or so of OathKeepers sending a literal call to arms to their members to stand in defiance of the fedgov in Nevada, I don't think my jumping to conclusions was being overly paranoid. Maybe a little bit though. I'm just glad it appears that I was wrong. I'll take being wrong on a public forum any day over what the feds taking down their website would have likely been a prelude to.

[mrp]

I still don't understand how a single hardware failure could disrupt all traffic to two different data centers, but I guess that doesn't really matter.

I don't know (for sure) where their DNS servers are physically located, but a tracert from where I'm sitting to either one dies in Provo.
Trace 198.1.71.127 ...
...
7 96.34.3.11 22ms 22ms 21ms TTL: 0 (prr01chcgil-bue-4.chcg.il.charter.com probable bogus rDNS: No DNS)
8 206.223.119.174 23ms 22ms 21ms TTL: 0 (tg1-2.br01.chcg.acedc.NET ok)
9 199.58.196.85 106ms 75ms 75ms TTL: 0 (ve58.ar04.prov.acedc.net ok)
10 No Response * * *

Trace 198.154.250.36 ...
...
7 96.34.3.11 22ms 21ms 22ms TTL: 0 (prr01chcgil-bue-4.chcg.il.charter.com probable bogus rDNS: No DNS)
8 206.223.119.174 21ms 21ms 22ms TTL: 0 (tg1-2.br01.chcg.acedc.NET ok)
9 199.58.196.85 77ms 78ms 82ms TTL: 0 (ve58.ar04.prov.acedc.net ok)
10 No Response * * *

[Spartan]

couldn't pull up their web site

[mrp]

Google does cache DNS records for a short while, and does regularly prefetch records for popular domains, but if oathkeeper's dns servers were down for an hour it wouldn't be surprising to find that neither google nor any of the other public DNS servers still had it cached.

That's interesting, and actually very surprising to me. I was under the impression that most DNS servers will cache entries for a day or more, specifically so the problem of a DNS server going down temporarily wouldn't result in its entries from becoming unreachable. That and performance.

There's no free lunch. If you have a short cache time (TTL) and your DNS server goes down you're in trouble. If you set a long cache time and then you have to move your website to another IP or someone screws up and publishes an incorrect DNS record or anything else happens where your webserver is no longer on the IP that your DNS server just got done telling everyone it's on, you'll suddenly be wishing that nobody had that old or incorrect information cached. (As it happens, there's a company getting burned right now because incorrect DNS records were published with a TTL of two days. They're reaching out to ISPs asking them to manually flush their DNS records from their caches.)

Also, having a secondary DNS server on a separate subnet in a different datacenter as a redundancy is supposed to prevent this kind of problem from happening.

If the location information for the IPs of their DNS servers are correct, one should be in located in Houston Texas, and the other in Provo Utah.

The location information in ARIN doesn't tell you anything other than the corporation's business address.

A router going out in Provo shouldn't be able to effect the proper operation of one in Texas. Maybe the internet is considerably more fragile than it was when I was first spun up on IP networks in the mid 90's. The idea was that the routing of packets and domain name resolution was supposed to be so redundant to be able to survive a nuclear attack, let alone a problem with a single router. Thus my pooping myself when I found the DNS entry removed.

You have to remember that oathkeepers appears to be running their own DNS servers. For $5/month they could pay one of the big DNS providers to play a backup role in case their own DNS servers go down.

[gunsmith]

Did they cut Cell phone networks in the Bundy Ranch area? A good prepper will have CB / Ham / shortwave radio handy.

[xd ED]

Thinking about this, if someone did want to take down their site, it would appear less suspicious to have a broader 'failure' than one specific .org.

Yeah, that thought actually crossed my mind, but once the outage was identified it did start to look more like a highly coincidental occurrence. I still don't understand how a single hardware failure could disrupt all traffic to two different data centers, but I guess that doesn't really matter.

Given that it did go down in an unusual way, within an hour or so of OathKeepers sending a literal call to arms to their members to stand in defiance of the fedgov in Nevada, I don't think my jumping to conclusions was being overly paranoid. Maybe a little bit though. I'm just glad it appears that I was wrong. I'll take being wrong on a public forum any day over what the feds taking down their website would have likely been a prelude to.

I didn't think it was paranoid to draw such a conclusion. I don't know didly-squat about computer networking, or inter web hardware.
But it's obvious the Oath Keepers, are now(if they weren't before) a component in this and future 'events', and thus a potential adversary of any three letter .gov tyrannical operations. While I don't believe it's legal, and certainly not moral, they (the ABCs) will be surveilling for weaknesses.
Again, I don't begin to understand what happened, technically, to me it's within reason to consider it something of a 'shark bump'.
I'd rather be wrong, But it's a reasonable thing to consider, given the timing and circumstances.

[mrp]

Most likely somebody doesn't like the Harry Reid link to the land grab as reported earlier this morning on the OK website

http://conservativeread.com/feds-desper ... land-grab/

http://www.snopes.com/politics/conspiracy/nevada.asp

[jshuberg]

One thing is absolutely certain. If the Bundy's were illegal immigrants, they never would have been raided. They would have had their college tuition paid by the Feds instead.

[mrp]

One thing is absolutely certain. If the Bundy's were illegal immigrants, they never would have been raided. They would have had their college tuition paid by the Feds instead.

http://professionals.collegeboard.com/g ... d-students

Federal, state and institutional financial aid policies

Undocumented students cannot legally receive any federally funded student financial aid, including loans, grants, scholarships or work-study money.

In most states, they are not eligible for state financial aid. Some states do grant eligibility for state financial aid to undocumented students who qualify for in-state tuition. This has proven a contentious issue, so the situation is subject to change.

Most private scholarship funds and foundations require applicants to be U.S. citizens or legal residents, but there are some that do not. The Resources section on this page links to a list of scholarships that may be available to undocumented students.

Private institutions set their own financial aid policies. Some are willing to give scholarships and other aid to undocumented students.

[Bearcatrp]

Most likely somebody doesn't like the Harry Reid link to the land grab as reported earlier this morning on the OK website

http://conservativeread.com/feds-desper ... land-grab/

http://www.snopes.com/politics/conspiracy/nevada.asp

You do know who owns snopes, right? Wouldn't trust them as far as i could throw them.

[BBeckwith]

Most likely somebody doesn't like the Harry Reid link to the land grab as reported earlier this morning on the OK website

http://conservativeread.com/feds-desper ... land-grab/

http://www.snopes.com/politics/conspiracy/nevada.asp

You do know who owns snopes, right? Wouldn't trust them as far as i could throw them.

http://www.snopes.com/info/aboutus.asp

The snopes.com web site is (and always has been) a completely independent, self-sufficient entity wholly owned by its operators, Barbara and David Mikkelson, and funded through advertising revenues. Neither the site nor its operators has ever received monies from (or been engaged in any business or editorial relationship with), any sponsor, investor, partner, political party, religious group, business organization, government agency, or any other outside group or organization.

Barbara Mikkelson is a Canadian citizen and as such cannot vote in U.S. elections, register an affiliation with a U.S. political party, or donate to any U.S. political campaign or candidate. David Mikkelson is an American citizen whose participation in U.S. politics has never extended beyond periodically exercising his civic duty at the ballot box. As FactCheck confirmed in April 2009, David is a registered independent who has never donated to, or worked on behalf of, any political campaign or party. The Mikkelsons are wholly apolitical, vastly preferring their quiet scholarly lives in the company of their cats to any political considerations.

Read more at http://www.snopes.com/info/aboutus.asp# ... lrlDaFq.99

excuse me while I go and purchase some stock in Reynolds Group Holdings

[mrp]

Most likely somebody doesn't like the Harry Reid link to the land grab as reported earlier this morning on the OK website

http://conservativeread.com/feds-desper ... land-grab/

http://www.snopes.com/politics/conspiracy/nevada.asp

You do know who owns snopes, right? Wouldn't trust them as far as i could throw them.

That's the nice thing about references, which they provide. Did you read
http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2014/04/12/The-Saga-of-Bundy-Ranch

[Jackpine Savage]

Bundy quit paying his grazing fees when they reduced his allotment from 900 to 150 head of cattle. Does anyone seriously doubt that the BLM wasn't determined to put him out of business with that much of a reduction?

I posted a couple of related articles on this thread: http://www.mnguntalk.com/viewtopic.php?f=55&t=50006&p=512819#p512819

In the Hage case the judge ruled that the BLM could at most reduce the allotment by 25%, and then only temporarily.

I don't think the Snope's article cleared up the mitigation angle at all. BLM's archived page: http://archive.today/nvlzr The BLM was under pressure from various 'conservation' groups to remove the trespass cattle.