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RIAA Web Site Moved To Linux
Posted by
kdawson
on Sun Jun 17, 2007 10:28 PM
from the circle-the-wagons dept.
from the circle-the-wagons dept.
xseedit writes "The RIAA has moved their main Web site www.riaa.com from IIS on Win2003 to Apache 2.2.3 on Red Hat. It appears that the move did not go smoothly as it resulted in an 8-hour downtime starting yesterday around noon, according to Netcraft. And the RIAA is still showing a 'temporarily under construction' page. They also moved their DNS from the small company that had been hosting them for the past 4 years, Tomorrow's Solutions Today (TST Inc.), to Mindshift Technologies. One can only guess what happened here, but the move seems to have been sudden and unplanned. They still haven't moved the riaa.org, riaa.net, and musicunited.org domains — those are still pointing to the TST nameservers that no longer accept queries for those domains. TST Inc. deserves credit, however. They seem to have managed to host the RIAA quite successfully for the past 4 years. Will Mindshift do a better job hosting one of the most reviled, and therefore most attacked, Web sites in the world? I wonder if anybody at the RIAA or TST would care to comment on the reasons behind this sudden move. Could it be that the RIAA is being sued by its hosting provider? Or perhaps the sue-happy organizaiton is suing its provider?"
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first post (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It not appears that they are at Apache version 2.2.4, and not 2.2.3 as previously claimed.
w0000000000000000000000w!
So... (Score:5, Funny)
NETCRAFT CONFIRMS: RIAA IS DEAD!
Parent
Re:first post (Score:5, Insightful)
What gets me is the rampant speculation.
Did the RIAA sue TNT? Did TNT sue the RIAA?
Or did the RIAA pull their business because the Son of Satan - still a young lad and not yet able to lead the hellish forces and kick-start the end of days - is an intern at TNT?
Who knows?
But until we do know, let's just put anything up on the board. Drudge does it. Why can't we?
Alas, sometimes I fool myself into thinking, just because they use the motto "News for Nerds..." this site actually tries to act as a news site instead of a blog (or a blog of other blogs).
Parent
Hopefully, with GPL version 4 (Score:5, Funny)
My guess... (Score:5, Insightful)
But... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:But... (Score:5, Funny)
Yeah, with a train full of lawyers and politicians.
I'll bring the hotdogs.
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Re:But... (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Finally!! (Score:4, Funny)
Uhh, okay. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Uhh, okay. (Score:5, Funny)
The RIAA is Paris Hilton for nerds where even the most pointless story that is related to it gets too much coverage.
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Re:Uhh, okay. (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Could it be? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Could it be? (Score:5, Funny)
I've been reading Slashdot for years now, this is the first time this happens.
Parent
I wonder (Score:5, Funny)
This is getting frustrating .... (Score:3, Funny)
All I do is hit "refresh" over and over and over and over
but nothing happens!
so are we supposed to... (Score:4, Funny)
Control passes through the teeny tiny loops of slashbot's brain for a while
ERROR: CANNOT DECIDE WHETHER THIS IS GOOD NEWS OR BAD
Here's a mistery... (Score:4, Interesting)
slashdotting (Score:5, Funny)
Test before going live (Score:4, Informative)
Take snapshot of old server
Deploy snapshot on new server.
Test new server under simulated load.
Sync new server with old server. Bonus if you can keep any web boards fully functional during the transition.
Redirect DNS.
PROFIT.
Sure the details are a bit more complicated but for a single server or small farm that's the gist of it.
If you plan it right and execute it right it should go without any hiccups.
Re:Test before going live (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, they were also moving platform -- I don't know whether their old site was static HTML with only a few simple scripts or something more complicated, but that can throw a spanner in the works.
Their site currently has a message saying they're launching a new site, so I think it wasn't a simple migration. Of course, stuffing up the launch of a new site on new servers takes a special kind of ineptitude all of its own.
Sure, but they're a bunch of lawyers so they wouldn't have done any of the technical planning, and they're moving to different web hosts which means neither host particularly cares: one is the ex-host which doesn't want to waste time and money on a customer they've already lost, and the other already has their money and a contract which says "you can fuck us over for 6 months because it's too expensive to go somewhere else until that point"; and each is blaming the other for the fuck up, as per standard operating procedure.
I'm probably a bit jaded, but it's been a long time since I've received adequate customer service from any of our suppliers, much less good service; but I guess that's inevitable when the only real point of comparison you can make between companies before actually using them for a while is price.
Parent
Link to Netcraft (Score:4, Informative)
Is this stuff that matters? Perhaps not for everybody, but some people may be interested. The P2Plawsuits [p2plawsuits.com] site to settle your case online instead of risking court was moved fast, but I wonder how many people would be willing to enter their credit card info on a site with an invalid SSL cert.
Nothing to see here (Score:4, Interesting)
The RIAA likely doesn't know -- much less care -- what OS or web server is running their web site. Unless you're actually a hosting company, or a company somehow involved in web hosting such that it's worth the time and money to run your own servers, the platform is entirely handled by whoever is doing your hosting. You decide who's doing your hosting based on price and features; "Linux" or "Windows" is not a feature in and of itself. Even the security of it isn't your concern: that's a problem for the people running the servers that host your website to deal with as they see fit. You, as a hosting customer, rely on their expertise in that regard.
So, pointless speculation about the deeper meaning aside, it seems they're launching a new site and moving to a new host at the same time. Only they don't have their new site ready (or it was ready, but then turned out to be broken so they're fixing it before trying again) before they moved. That's a bit odd, unless their old site had incorrect or damaging information on it and having no website was better than leaving that content up... but a big company mismanaging the move and relaunch of a website is hardly news.
Re:Careful... (Score:5, Funny)
My best guess is that the RIAA has been feeding little children to alligators in third world countries and charging admission in order to pay for their webhosting, and their previous hosting company found out about it. I have no evidence that they have stopped the practice, but they may now be selling children on the black market as well because of the higher TCO for running Linux, as evidenced by all the non-libelous reports from Microsoft. Moreover, in my estimation the quickest way for the RIAA to migrate their pages to a Linux host involves slave labor in Chinese coding factories with 16 hour workdays, 7 days a week, paying the overworked programmers only One Pittance per month.It's also really easy to claim that any losses incurred during the switch were caused by "piracy." Now I'm not an expert on the RIAA or anything, but I would be completely surprised if it wasn't true.
Sue me for that, suckers.
Parent