Slashdot Mirror
How Not To Run a Campaign Website
Soong writes "The blogsphere has been going crazy today about the technical difficulties being experienced by the Joe Lieberman for CT Senator web site, joe2006.com. MyDD outlines the story so far and has continuing updates. A reader at DailyKos digs deeper and finds some shamefully exposed ports. A front page story there has the money quote: 'Joe's site shares one server with 73 other sites. They pay $15/month for an overcrowded server, and then they blame others when it goes down?' kos also mentions that 'My hosting bill is now over $7K per month.' While this has immediate consequences for Joe Lieberman's campaign since his site went down Sunday night/Monday morning and the election is today, it makes me curious to see an expose on what exactly we're getting from various vendors when we buy into sub $100/month hosting plans."
A quick look at this from a semi-competent admin (myself) brings me to one of two conclusions. 1) The admin(s) of this site are TOTALLY incompetent, or 2) this server was made vulnerable on purpose, in order to attract or make possible a DoS attack, which could then be used to generate negative publicity and sympathy.
I don't know any admins stupid enough to fall into category #1, so I'm tending to believe it's #2.
Please.
The "shamefully exposed ports" sounds a lot like portsentry, an IDS-type app that listens on ports even if no service is running.
As for cheap hosting plans - we host clients anywhere from $12.75/month to 100 times that - some sites need a lot of capacity, most don't. But, virtually across the board, many people have no idea how much bandwidth they really need until it's too late.
Any reasonable hosting company should have noticed the domain name and made arrangements for such a high profile site. Of course, this assumes that the engineers at the hosting provider were neutral...
Video for Online Dating Profiles
It's a series of tubes. Tangled up tubes. Those democrats went and treated it like a truck...you can't do that! It's not something you can just dump things into. It's just tubes.
Ouch. Talk about exacerbating the problem.
Is to put 9 flash videos on your home page, like Arnold's campaign tards did the day of the California special election last November. The same idiots are now pushing the limits of how much they can make gov.ca.gov into a campaign site.
The fact that Joe Lieberman couldn't keep his website running is a good metaphor for why he lost this challenge by someone who even a few months ago was a nobody.
I think it's particularly interesting that political websites all across the US have been sluggish and crash-happy for most of the day. The amount of interest in this single campaign (a primary, ffs!) crashed not only Joe Lieberman's site, but forced Kos to run a stripped down front page, completely b0rked the official results page, and has slowed down just about any place with breaking news about this race.
I know it's inane to speak of the Power of the Web. The web's not doing anything; it's just people doing what they've always done - showing curiousity whenever something catches their interest. The difference here is that the medium has changed, and this particular medium has created the ability to generate political clout for those who know how to use it. I don't mean that in the Goebbels 'Big Lie' sense - quite the opposite. This campaign in particular has shown that on the Internet, all lies are shallow. And that's a direct challenge to American Politics as it's practised today.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
There's not a whole lot of other information. It was paid for by the "Friends of Joe Lieberman" (so he didn't even use his own funds for it), and the hosting company was The Planet Internet Services. Anyone buying the services of a company with a name that pretentious almost deserves problems. Oh, the ISP is located in Dallas, Texas. Not exactly a local vendor, then. And who -are- those mysterious Friends over in Texas, anyway...?
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
> You guys direct linked a $15/mo server?!!!??!!!?!?!?!!!??????
It will only blow one fuse; $15 is about what it will cost to fix it.
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Is the name of his campaign committee - see FEC filing at http://herndon1.sdrdc.com/cgi-bin/can_detail/S8CT0 0022/
Cue The Sun...
I would basically tell them to fuck off. what can they do, make a stink about how they are trying to rip you off (because any hosting plan like that is simply a scam)
The phrase "more better" is acceptable English. suck it grammar Nazis
Personally, I have to poo-poo the media on this. The Leiberman's website goes down, the liberal blogosphere takes notice and investigates almost in real time. One notable fact uncovered was other domains on the same box were serving pages just fine. This more or less rules out a denial of service which would have brought down the entire machine.
Hours later CNN and others are running stories with the Leiberman campaign accusing Lamont of unethical behavior. Give me a break! What a free pass CNN gives to Lieberman for a late smear. Two sides to a story (i'll accept the premise) perhaps, but one is obviously using the chance (perhaps a 'wired' one at that) for a cheapshot with no time on the clock. Reporters and editors should check with their local geek before becoming such avoidable pawns in a serious contest about the future of the USA.
Fortunately, it appears this didn't push the election.
Slashdot: Failed Car Analogies. Amateur Lawyering. Anecdote Battles.
with shared hosting. They just need to contact their cpanel admin, the person reselling the planet's services and have them take a look at (either whm or mb) their billing software and override that they have gone over bandwidth. Yes, they've paid their bill, but if you go over bandwidth, you still run into trouble.
That's what happens when you use cheap services.
This is all obvious because cpanel is the only crappy control panel I know with their own distro of roothat linux that runs the melange chat server on port 6666. It's not an IRC server -- the dailykos portscanners don't know their shit.
They also ran joomla, the mambo open source effort. Well, I bet somebody saved up a zero day in joomla for this effort if it wasn't a simple "haven't paid the bills", except for the fact that joe's campaign should have had a copy of the joomla on disk that they installed so they could easily restore it. It doesn't take that long to get a website back up. Maybe somebody did take it down with an SQL injection attack. It would have been so simple to setup a quick urlrewrite to thwart most sql injections after they got the site up.
In any case, the fact they are running cpanel is enough to convince me the admins don't know their shit.
Democrats saw Leiberman as too close to President George W. Bush, not necessarily the Republican party. Realize this election is all about the lack of _faith_ this country has for Mr. Bush and friends right now. If you are seen as an enabler of this administration's policies, you are vulnerable. This pro-Lamont outcome is striking fear into certain Republicans who don't sit in clearly gerrymandered districts (which is a serious cancer on democracy spreading throughout this nation so _wake up_). Don't expect a large volume of changes in either house of Congress due this incumbency stranglehold/advantage, but perhaps enough to wrestle control of the direction of the country from the President back to Congress. As the founders intended (very slowly/deliberately).
I just clicked on the link and I got the following (hilarious) text:
UPDATE ON THE ATTACK ON THE LIEBERMAN CAMPAIGN WEBSITE
STATEMENT FROM SEAN SMITH: "For the past 24 hours the Friends for Joe Lieberman's website and email has been totally disrupted and disabled, we believe that this is the result of a coordinated attack by our political opponents. The campaign has notified the US Attorney and the Connecticut Chief State's Attorney and the campaign will be filing a formal complaint reflecting our concerns. The campaign has also notified the State Attorney General Dick Blumenthal for his review."
"We call on Ned Lamont to make an unqualified statement denouncing this kind of dirty campaign trick and to demand whoever is responsible to cease and desist immediately. Any attempt to suppress voter participation and undermine the voting process on Election Day is deplorable and has no place in our democracy."
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
If you think you can cheap out and push terabytes for nothing, you will quickly find out that free lunches are hard to find anymore.
Unless you're a doctor in America.
And yes, this has to do with the campaign. The first thing Lamont talked about in his speech this evening was not the war-- it was health care.
W
-------------------
This is my SIG. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
Even though I know feeding the trolls is a lousy idea, here I go again..
The reason that this election is such a big deal is that a very senior senator is in a very tight race with someone from his own party. The democratic voters in Connecticut are tired of having Bush's lapdog taking up their seat in the senate. I wouldn't ordinarily throw names like that around, but what else do you call some who's voting record deviates from the President's wishes in less than 1 percent of his votes? If he was smart, he would have switched parties before this election. It's not unheard of, and he'd actually have a chance at winning. His opponent, Ned Lamont, has a lot of big groups behind him, including MoveOn.org. Lieberman is so afraid of losing his seat that they brought out the big dogs and had Bill Clinton campaigning for him in Connecticut. This is not your average race.
You may be right about the democrats saying 'goodbye to '08' though. This race definitely shows that democratic voters are tired of the democrats attempting to be republicans. Democrats, and even republicans, that want to win this fall will need to go against the President and distance themselves from him.
Aero
Please stop hurting America -- Jon Stewart
So instead of an "effect" we now have a Slashdot "Attack" which has been apparently aimed at taking down their website. What a joke. Someone at Slashdot may want to send these guys an email letting them know that this isn't a DDoS!
My only quibble with your post (and it doesn't undercut your point at all, hence a quibble) is that the race wasn't even remotely tight, particularly during the last two weeks; the polls had Lieberman getting pasted to the tune of 7-10 points. Exits showed a slightly tighter race (4-5 points) which isn't really tight at all in a primary, particular for an unknown vs. a long-time incumbent.
All the techniques ever used to make men moral have been themselves thoroughly immoral... (Nietzsche)
Have they not heard the old saying .....
If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys!
I tried to develop a shopping site for a friend to host on a similarly cheap server. I tested it on my "Internet Connection Sharer", an old K6/1 running at 200MHz with just 48MB of RAM {and still able to run Apache, Perl, PHP and MySQL}. I swear that little machine was faster and more reliable than the hosted server.
The also made some really awful mistakes. Like using the same password for FTP {which, of course, is your unix login password} and MySQL. That would not have been too bad if it weren't for the fact that any PHP or Perl script could read any files in any user's home directory {they have to be world-readable just so the low-privileged Apache daemon can see them} which might very likely include the username and password for connecting to the database {and thus, the user's unix login and password}. Fortunately for them, I was too polite to demonstrate what this meant.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Alright, so now we have an admin who blames all his problems on being hacked, and the story is posted on /. I wonder how many script kiddies are running their proggies against the site right now. I give it another hour or two before that page gets replaced with "I pwzn j00!" or some other unintelligible leet speek.
An expose on what people get for buying a sub-$100 shared-hosting account? Here's a clue, not only can't you handle the Slashdot effect, you'll probably have a hard time handling the "Mable-the-town-gossip-told-her-inner-circle" effect. That isn't an expose, that is a "I didn't read the contract which has no true SLA in it" moment.
Charles
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
At myHOSTCAMP.com the reliablility of our servers is unmatched (99.9% uptime), the expertise of our staff is second to none and our online support team is always ready to help.
...For the beast had been reborn with its strength renewed, and the followers of Mammon cowered in horror.
Was this just a random number, or is there an actual way to tell how many virtual websites are sharing the same ip address?
Just curious.
Once upon a time, I got my own website. After months of searching and trying a bunch of discount hosts that gave me less than I paid for, I came across phpwebhosting.com and all was good. While only $10 a month, it provide me with great reliable hosting and even better tech support. That was in 1998. By 2003 I had moved all of my client's sites to phpwebhosting.com and everything was still good. Of course there were now cheaper discount hosts (some for as low as $4 a month!), but I stayed with phpwebhosting.com b/c of the great past and present service.
Then 2004 arrived. AOL and other ISPs started blocking email sent from phpwebhosting.com servers. I managed to work around the problem, but I had no idea what had happened in the background. Then one day, I noticed that instead of one of my domains going to phpwebhosting.com's server, it was going to theplanet.com's. After more research it appeared that theplanet.com had taken over phpwebhosting.com, or at the very least phpwebhosting.com was just reselling theplanet.com's stuff.
At the end of 2004 things started to turn bad. One client's site was down for 5-6 hours a day for an entire week. No warning, no appology, and no responce to the trouble ticket. Then all of the clients started to be blocked again by AOL. Then worse my personal account could not recieve email. Since all of this started just before X-mas, I gave them a week to reply to the trouble ticket (in the past it was normally only 24hr or less). Then I raised the level of the ticket and asked for an update. Since New Years was just around the corner, I gave them another week to do something. Nothing happened. At this point, I started to get phone calls from people asking why my email was bouncing. The ticket was already at the emergency level, so I again asked for an update. Still nothing by the end of the first week in Jan.
I began the really annoying task of seeking out a new webhost. Meanwhile the clock was ticking on the trouble ticket. The 2nd week in Jan was gone and I had found the place I would move some of my clients (other's I decided to set up on their own servers). The end of Jan, I finally moved the last of my domains from phpwebhosting.com (which I think is now controlled by theplanet.com). Over a month had gone by and there was still no answer to the trouble ticket.
I can only say that for many years phpwebhosting.com was great and that only after theplanet.com somehow became involved with them did the server go down hill. It must be theplanet.com's fault. Had the Friends of Joe Lieberman knew about this, I'm sure they would have chosen a better discount webhost.
Source? From what I can tell Lieberman is only with Bush on the war issue.
Why in the WORLD would the host provider (myhostcamp.com) disclose ANY CLIENT INFO to a third party?!? This includes what type of account the customer has.
The New Haven Register, by Gregory B. Hladky on 03/13/2006
Sided with Congress to force prolonging Terri Schiavo's life, against her and her husband's wishes.5 5.shtml
http://www.newsmax.com/archives/ic/2005/3/27/2139
Voted for Attorney General Gonzalez, who thinks the Geneva Conventions are "quaint" and supports torturing detainees who are held indefinitely without trial or access to attorneysp ?vote_id=3452
http://www.vote-smart.org/issue_keyvote_member.ph
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/4000679.stm
Voted to stop debate/prevent filibuster so Alito could be added to the Supreme Courti sts/roll_call_vote_cfm.cfm?congress=109&session=2& vote=00001
http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_l
"Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity."
-Robert Hanlon
Don't forget all policy related to Israel and gay rights.
Don't forget all policy related to Israel and gay rights.
Oh, and big support for "faith-based" programs (government handouts to religious organizations), his support for the bankruptcy bill, his refusal to allow his party to filibuster *ANY* judicial nominee.
Joe Lieberman got a lot of credit in the 90's for being a "bipartisanship" guy, wherein he was willing to compromise with the Republican party. This is a good thing if you're the party in power, but the Democrats became an opposition party, and the only power they have left is in opposition. Lieberman never got the memo, though. He pent too long in the Beltway, schmoozing with Republican power-brokers and A-list (right-leaning) TV pundits, absorbing the conventional wisdom in a get-along-to-go-along Smiley Gladhands kind of way. In short, he became completely out-of-touch with the people who elected him.
All Lieberman had to do to win was play Elder Statesman -- smile, say nice things about Ned Lamont when pressed, but try not to mention him any other time, and when the primary came up, just flood the airwaves with lots of sunny, positive ads about his past record and experience and leave it at that. Voters go "Ned who?" and Joe coasts to re-election.
He didn't do that. He viciously attacked Lamont and The Internets. He seemed angry that there was even to be a primary at all. (How dare they!) He acted as though his seat was his by right, and anyone who disagreed with him was "unreasonable." He tried whitewashing his recent record, claiming to be a big opponent of Bush and the Iraqi war, which just made him look sad and dishonest. He did EVERYTHING wrong. He got support from Bill Clinton (who he tut-tutted during the Monica era, since old Holy Joe can never resist a chance to appear morally superior to someone) and that helped, but not enough.
It's a repeat of 2000 and 2004 -- the more Joe Lieberman campaigns, the less people like him. He's better off avoiding notice, as he's a really dislikable guy.
Gerrymandering works by concentrating your opponents' voters together in as few districts as possible, and distributing your voters in as many as possible (but still over 50% in each one), thus minimizing their representatives' numbers and maximizing your own. This only works as long as you're pretty sure you know how everyone is going to vote. Cut it too close, or piss off enough people in your districts, or both, and you lose big time.
Hoist by their own petard, as it were...
"A great democracy must be progressive or it will soon cease to be a great democracy." --Theodore Roosevelt
About bandwidth
1.5mbps = 486gB/month
And it costs from 25U$ to 50U$ depending how much and from who you buy.
Of course it's just about bandwidth, no other costs involved, like a top service datacenter.
$15/mo is the most expensive plan (Plan C) that they had listed on their website. However, their website is down too! It looks like myhostcamp is just completely incompetent--given their site, their statements, and their actions, I wouldn't trust them to reboot their server, but I'm not surprised at all that they're trying to cover their own asses.