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:Really???

[sepluv]

I honestly can't believe this got posted. Everything in this description is pure speculation and the only link is to the RIAA

It was clearly posted by the RIAA's marketing department in a desperate bid for a bit of publicity for their site. Protection rackets crave publicity because it helps them extort money and they just like showing off how they can get away with stuff (cf. the Mafia). Also, the poster [slashdot.org] is quite a new account with only one previous post (and he didn't link his name in the submission).

(For the humour impaired, no, I don't really think they posted it; just trying to make the boring drivel that passes for a story these days on /. more interesting.)

Re:Really???

[sepluv]

It would be great if the submitter did work for the RIAA as his only comment on a story was "I use a...media streamer, providing access to your entire music collection wherever you are. This way I don't need to fill up my laptop drive and I can access my collection from anywhere...". Hmmm....clearly an "evil theiving pirate".

Here's a mistery...

[Tatisimo]

Why do they (the RIAA) have a "Parental Advisory: Explicit Content" on their temporary page right now? I wonder...

Re:Uhh, okay.

[kimvette]

Actually, it does. RIAA, for all their crying about IP rights, is moving to Linux, which Microsoft claims violates 235 patents, and even insinuate that Linux might contain Microsoft-copyrighted code. If the RIAA truly cared about IP, they would steer clear of Linux for the sake of PR, regardless of increased security risks and licensing costs they incur by continuing to host on Windows.

The funny thing is....

[Anonymous Coward]

that they moved because the attacks were successful. They were obviously moved in a hasty fashion and that is why the site is under construction. All in all, the Windows site WAS wiped out.

Nothing to see here

[totally bogus dude]

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.