Did Norm Coleman's campaign fake a Web site crash?

[JI7]

< Was this a terrible publicity stunt gone really wrong?

Here is what Coleman's campaign said when their site went down:

"Minnesotans and folks across the country are fed up with Al Franken's efforts to disenfranchise thousands of Minnesota voters, and the overwhelming response we received to making this information public is proof positive of that fact," said Campaign Manager Cullen Sheehan. "The Franken campaign's ongoing effort to quash votes is clearly not sitting well with Minnesotans, and we intend to continue fighting for each and every one of these voters who deserve to have their valid vote counted."

The new site has a searchable database where voters can check to see if Franken is trying to "disenfranchise".

Landry at MnPublius says the traffic wouldn't crash their site and it's simply a publicity stunt. He gets into some technical nerdage on IP addresses and site traffic, so read it all here.

And Minnesota Independent has an interesting take on the crash:

Tony Webster, a Minneapolis web developer, explained to me that the IP address the Coleman campaign used prior to today's "crash" (208.42.168.197) is responsive. Translation: "If the site was truly down, that IP wouldn't be responsive. If it wasn't, their story might have validity. In fact, I can see their last blog post today. The title is 'Senate Trial: Every ballot has a story.' If the site was down, I wouldn't see that at all."

He says he can also see that the campaign has a Google Analytics account. "If they wanted to be transparent, they could release those logs and graphs," he said. "Since it's a third-party source, they can't modify the data. If they changed that DNS to mitigate a problem, you should see it."

Any other Web nerds out there with a take on this? >


http://blogs.citypages.com/blotter/2009/01/did_norm_colema.php

[FormerDittoHead]

1. I contributed to Franken, but this isn't very informative: a webmaster's perspective.

You can have an IP address "responsive" and have one of the servers totally crash on that host.

First off, I have no idea what "responsive' means. It returns a ping? If the website was up and running, they wouldn't need to use vague language, they would simply say it was working perfectly.

A searchable website like the one Coleman's people described requires a web server and database. I happened to be running a website 2 years ago when the demand for the website went way beyond our expectations, and poorly designed media-intensive webpages (the home page was over 2 megs to load, but I had no idea that demand would be so high, until the client got on TELEVISION) made the server on the host (linux) crash. It was still running, actually, but it was slowed down so much as to be unusable.

The point is that if such a website and searchable database wasn't designed for the demand, or on an unrealistic budget (we can do this for $50 a month, right?) I could see it crashing, and yet "responsive".

[KharmaTrain]

5. Sounds Like It Might Be Bad MySQL...

I've worked with sites as well and have seen them buckle under heavy load and a victim of hacker attacks. As you say, they can be traced...either to see if and when there was a spike in demand or if and where an attack was coming from.

This kinda sounds like a cheap MySQL or that it wasn't configured...thus searchable pages weren't coming up...or a glitch in the program (similar to what we see from time to time here on DU) that can freeze a server or part of the site.

My bets are Normie, just like other tech-illiterate regpunicans used a cheap web design/hosting company that lacked both the bandwidth and server redundancy to handle a lot of traffic. Reminds me of the Liebermann website crash in 2006 he tried to pin on Ned Lamont...only to be revealed TraitorJoe used a cheap company.

If I were Normie, I wouldn't worry about a website these days...no one cares about him anymore. Go away!!!

[Trekologer]

7. See my reply #6

It was taken down.

[MagickMuffin]

2. A stunt for someone with Stunted Brain Syndrome.

This website gives more details, along with readers comments.

http://mnpublius.com/2009/01/team-coleman-fakes-website-crash/

[woodwrite]

3. A couple of observations....

First off, the republicans wrote the book on voter disenfranchisement, eh? So Coleman seems to "protest too much." And Franken is a sufficient political novice that he certainly wouldn't be up to speed on disenfranchisement tricks. Besides,... I am so looking forward to having Franken as a senator,.....

[Vinca]

4. Norm really needs to explore the horror film industry.

That photo is absolutely frightening.

[Trekologer]

6. www.colemanforsenate.com resolves to 1.1.1.1

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).