Oz Parliament Website Dead
Posted by Dave Bath on 2009-01-10
Has parliament fallen foul of the internet filter? Maybe not, but given that quite a few keywords that would appear in a content-filtering blacklist would be found in Hansard, and testing is apparently underway, who knows?
It is just after 19:00 AEDST and the Australian Parliament website is offline, dead, out of action, crashed, … it has ceased to ping. Either there is shocking IT planning, or delicious irony. No "we are going off air for scheduled maintenance" messages were on the website earlier today that I could see.
Obviously my connection is ok, and australia.gov.au is online (but the link from it to parliament is broken), so parliament (I tried both http://aph.gov.au and http://www.aph.gov.au) is the problem.
Or has someone hacked in?
This would be a giggle if it wasn’t such an indicator of incompetence somewhere where there shouldn’t be any.
Has anybody else seen the same thing?
Anybody feel like doing a more complete parody of the parrot sketch?
Update: Now 20:00 22:00 23:00 23:55 05:00 and still out of action. If anyone can note when (hopefully not if it comes up again with a cron job or something using wget/traceroute/ping, that would be fantastic, as would any times when somebody FIRST noticed this. Jacques from Club Troppo has confirmed the parrot sketch applicability.
http://nocleanfeed.com
Dave Bath said
And make as many jokes about poor responsiveness of parliament to Australians’ needs as you like, given the following browser messages:
Firefox: Network Timeout. The server at http://www.aph.gov.au is taking too long to respond.
Google Chrome: Oops! This link appears broken. Page not found – unknown error.
Safari: Safari could not open the page “http://www.aph.gov.au/” because the server is not responding.
Konqueror:The requested operation could not be completed Connection to Server Refused
Details of the Request: URL: http://www.aph.gov.au
Protocol: http Date and Time: Saturday 10 January 2009 19:57
Additional Information: http://www.aph.gov.au: Unknown error
Description: The server http://www.aph.gov.au refused to allow this computer to make a connection. Possible Causes:
* The server, while currently connected to the Internet, may not be configured to allow requests.
* The server, while currently connected to the Internet, may not be running the requested service (http).
* A network firewall (a device which restricts Internet requests), either protecting your network or the network of the server, may have intervened, preventing this request.
Dave Bath said
OMG! Just released the error may have happened when I was online much earlier today… details here. That was around 14:00
Dave Bath said
See also Jacques’ post at CT
Parliament is unresponsive (2009-01-10) which has a few more diagnostics, and is collecting nerdy jokes about the matter (although feel free to add them here)
Oh, and I checked DSD
C:\Users\bathdt>ping www.dsd.gov.auPinging wombat.dsd.gov.au [203.6.114.3] with 32 bytes of data:
OOoooohhhh…. I’m sure that the DSD folk know that “wombat” is Olde Hackish for “Waste Of Money, Brains And Time”
clarencegirl said
Now I’m pretty sure that the Palestinians have not downed the Australian Federal Parliament website and, although the last time I looked at its traffic details on Alexa 2.7% of all Internet visitors to http://www.aph.gov.au came from Iran I’m fairly certain that the answer does not lie within that country’s borders.
So why has it suddenly gone off line?
Well Whois states that its server is:
Name Server: ns1.optus.net.au
Name Server IP: 202.139.83.3
Name Server: ns1.aph.gov.au
Name Server IP: 202.14.81.3
Name Server: ns2.aph.gov.au
Name Server IP: 202.14.81.4
Optus itself is still online and its problems with subcontractors was not supposed to result in a national strike this month, so it is unlikely that industrial relations issues have caused the disappearance of the parliament website.
However, Optus has previously stated that it would take part in the Rudd-Conroy live trial of The Great Firewall of Australia.
It has also stated that its own part in this trial will be confined to one geographic area.
See: http://www.optus.com.au/portal/site/aboutoptus/menuitem.cfa0247099a6f722d0b61a108c8ac7a0/?vgnextoid=85eff2e37741e110VgnVCM10000002cd780aRCRD
Perhaps with a touch of weird Aussie humour, Optus decided that the ACT would be its target area.
Dave Bath said
Clarencegirl:
Well done, and good background links.
Now there is a HUGE difference between operating a blacklist (trivial… we used it in the usenet era with newsgroups and mail over uucp so no grunt required these days) and content filtering which will be on keywords (and don’t get me started on the intractable problem of image analysis – which may or may not pick up pottery and plato).
The net HAS been dog slow.
So, what is the only difference between aph.gov.au and non-blocked sites like australia.gov.au, centrelink, tax, prime minister and cabinet, compared to the only thing I can find that is broken…. aph.gov.au??? The only difference in content is that I doubt if tax and centrelink contains the sort of “think of the children” keywords the content filtering is supposed to stop.
Unless, it’s not just keywords which would be found in other places (sociology/law related universities perhaps, which I don’t know are blocked or not), …. what if someone inside aph.gov.au has been VERY VERY VERY bad and thinking they could get away with evil activities?
Police and retired judges have been caught after all!
danny said
7:48 sunday morning queensland time, aph.gov.au works for me
Lyn said
Ditto danny at 8.30
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Dave Bath said
Checking around with friends, it was still off-line at 05:00 this morning. That’s either 10 hours minimum, or if my guess is around 14:00 yesterday when my transaction blew up, about 15 hours.
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