RIAA Web Site Moved To Linux

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?"

Re:Uhh, okay.

[Necroman]

You are always welcome to startup your own Slashdot like site. You can even you Slashcode if you want to do it.

On Standing Up Targets

[bill_mcgonigle]

Amen to that. I dislike the RIAA's unjust actions as much as anyone else here. But who gives a crap what webserver or host provider they use!

Well, the posited theory is that it's one of the most attacked websites. If you take this line of reasoning further, they probably hired a security consultant to figure out the most secure method of hosting a website, to alleviate problems. Maybe he specified an SELinux-based web server, and that's why they had so much downtime (heh, I kid mercilessly - Dan Walsh does great work). Maybe the new DNS provider handles DNSSEC correctly, or has better perimeter defense.

Now, if this reasoning is true, it could have been presented much more intelligently as a case study (certainly there's no reason we needed to know about this right away), but there's still some interesting information in it.

Re:So...

[Anonymous Coward]

I actually did laugh, and nearly choked on my pizza. Bravo.

Test before going live

[davidwr]

Um, how hard can a server migration be?

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.

Link to Netcraft

[xseedit]

In case some people want to see for themselves the Netcraft stats can be found here [netcraft.com] and to verify who owns a domain and what the authoritative nameservers are one should use whois [whois.net].
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.

Re:My grandmother doesn't care about such bullshit

[Architect_sasyr]

It's called meta moderating... if you had bothered to research even a slight bit (kid's these days!) you would know that slashdot has a feature for this. Whilst I agree with neither moderation (all should have been offtopic, as I expect this will get moderated by someone), the fact is that they are completely off topic and should not be viewed by the people who do not surf at -1 (and judging by the utter stupidity of the post I am responding to I can see why). If you don't like what you can't see (and slashdot DOES say "1 reply beneath your threshold" where necessary) then you can change it. If you can't do that, or if your little level 2 gnome can't handle the action, then don't get into the fight.

One other thing... GET OFF MY LAWN! Damned kids...