What is up with FPN?

[Jon Szanto]

Curious as to whether any of the people who were temporarily suspended, actually saw the group designation "Away" = Banned upon their accounts?

I'll speak to that directly: I was upset with the way a few people were treated and summarily shut down. At around the same time, attempting to write to one of them, I noticed the "Away" group designation. I posted an inquiry in a public part of the forum, asking what specifically that meant.

Thread lasted a couple of hours, then disappeared, and I was admonished in private. It was clear that "Away" meant "Banned", but I was to not discuss it in public. It was at that point that I sent a few notes to friends and mods that I've become acquaintances of, indicating that my future relationship with FPN was questionable, due to the way some very good people were treated.

I'm personally sorry to be that way, as I've learned a lot from my two years at FPN. I don't have nearly the pen knowledge that many others have, and I don't walk away casually or cavalierly. Nonetheless, as meaningless as it may be in the big scheme of things, how people treat each other is important to me, and I'd prefer to not further the popularity or usefulness of an arena like that with my contributions, small as they may be. It may be a gesture that amounts to peeing yourself in a dark suit, but one has to have some principles to live by. Shared respect is one of mine.

I think it is high time for a dram of Ardbeg. I bid you all a good evening.

[KrazyIvan]

Okay, now that I know the story of he who shall not be named, it makes sense. The linking of photos via an outside service being not what FPN admins want makes much more sense now.

[79spitfire]

Okay, now that I know the story of he who shall not be named, it makes sense. The linking of photos via an outside service being not what FPN admins want makes much more sense now.

Yes it does, I will have to remember NOT to upload any content that I want to keep control of to FPN.

[david i]

Is FPN now providing free photo storage, as per the 25MB per customer (and extra space in common albums) offered at FPB? Last i played, FPN offered uploads only to posts, with a few MB cap that quickly was filled. Perhaps times have changed.

regards

david

[whych]

Is FPN now providing free photo storage, as per the 25MB per customer (and extra space in common albums) offered at FPB? Last i played, FPN offered uploads only to posts, with a few MB cap that quickly was filled. Perhaps times have changed.

If you look at the ipboard vendor site (the guys who supply the software) you will find that one of their extras is an 'upload/storage' module to allow members to post images, etc.
Just one of the extras you can get after you have paid for your $175 licence.

Having read most of this thread, it seems that somewhere along the line FPN are either not being entirely honest in their explanations as to why the board has been taken down, or have been misled.

The nameserver bit does not ring true for the following reason:
nameserver software on any major 'worth it's salt' provider is inherently secure, and if it was open to being hacked, you would have a fair chunk of the Internet community working on a fix for it.
In a nutshell:
What the nameserver does is provide an ip address for the site that you ar wanting to access, so that when I want to go to www.somesite.com it will provide the correct ip address for that site.
Every site on the Internet then has to have a UNIQUE ip address for it to work.
The original spec for nameservers require that you have 2 nameservers and that these should be placed in separate locations to provide for redundancy in case one goes down.

This means that if anything was changed, it was changed with the nameservers and this can ONLY BE DONE BY A PERSON WHO HAS ADMIN ACCESS rights to the account.
If this is so, then there is more in-fighting going on at FPN than their posts are admitting and perhaps they should rather have put up a message to say the site was having admin problems and would be back shortly instead of all the gobbledygook doublespeak they have posted.

The latest posting that there will be a 24 hour delay for the name to be propogated through the nameservers is only true if the site has been moved to a new hosting service and has been given a new ip address.

Also, the way the nameservers have been set up at present for the site will never work because you cannot use your own domain name for DNS address which they have at present (their nameservers are ns1.fountainpen... and ns2.fountain...) which is why I get a 'site not found error' when I try to access it.

By trying to hide the truth of the matter just means that they end up alienating the loyal contributers and users and when the truth does emerge it could do more damage than if they were just open about it at the outset. (To take and example from US histiry, if Nixon had admitted everything at the start, it would probably have all just blown over instead of ... .)

Hopefully they all pull themselves together and get the board back up and running or they will lose more people.
I see many FPN users have already made a move to an alternative site for their daily fix of penmania.

[tytoalba]

Curious as to whether any of the people who were temporarily suspended, actually saw the group designation "Away" = Banned upon their accounts?

I'll speak to that directly: I was upset with the way a few people were treated and summarily shut down. At around the same time, attempting to write to one of them, I noticed the "Away" group designation. I posted an inquiry in a public part of the forum, asking what specifically that meant.

Thread lasted a couple of hours, then disappeared, and I was admonished in private. It was clear that "Away" meant "Banned", but I was to not discuss it in public. SNIP

Thanks for sharing this... Something I did not see.

[nomadhacker]

DNS is *not* the problem. Whych is right in that something sounds off about the explanation. (though you can use your domain for name servers. ie ns1.mydomain.com-- you actually register the ips of the nameservers with upstream servers and register the names that way. It's not actually clearly explained anywhere, but I've done it myself)

The thing is, DNS resolves the top level domain (and sub domains). The DNS system points the domain to its controlling server. The server parses out and handles the full URL.

In other words if it were DNS, it would be the WHOLE domain. ALL pages. Not just some URLs. The front page of the site would not be any different than other pages. The whole site would be getting redirected until the problem was resolved.

[Jimmy James]

I think we all know it's not as simple as DNS. Whatever it is, I think we're getting on toward a week of sporadic outage. Whatever was done is some nasty business that IMHO FPN does not deserve no matter how Wim or others may have acted in other situations. I hope they actually do have a handle on it now.

[david i]

I think we all know it's not as simple as DNS. Whatever it is, I think we're getting on toward a week of sporadic outage. Whatever was done is some nasty business that IMHO FPN does not deserve no matter how Wim or others may have acted in other situations. I hope they actually do have a handle on it now.

Some situations do invite Schadenfreude, no doubt. Of course, I am certain I would be unhappy if FPB went through this sort of thing. One can play with philosophy and with "degree of evil" no doubt (in fact, such chats can be engaging), but I don't know that I accept the notion that "no matter how one acted", a site crash is never deserved. I mean, if someone were a thief, murderer, what have you, then a site crash would seem a quite modest punishment. I don't know enough about the backdoor evil at FPN though to comment as to whether this event was "deserved". I merely don't dismiss the possibility it was deserved

regards

david

[Jimmy James]

Schadenfreude in your situation I completely accept. I don't *think* anybody at FPN has raped or murdered to my knowledge, so I'm sticking with the idea that whatever hacking was done is undeserved. That's me.

[david i]

Hi Jimmy,

Please note that I have not accused anyone of rape or murder, heaven forbid. I merely wished to generate a logical construct to approach the issue you raised. Indeed, I well recognize that there is good chance you are correct that the hacking (if it even was hacking) was not "deserved". However... i don't assume it.

regards

David

[Jimmy James]

I read you. I, in turn, was just sort of applying your construct to my own value system not attempting to put words in your mouth. I enjoy reading and occasionally interacting with you. I hated that your class reunion fell on Raleigh Pen Show weekend last year.

[david i]

I'll be in Raleigh this year. Do drop over to FPB as well.

regards

david

[nomadhacker]

I want to make sure and clarify that I was merely speaking earlier of the DNS system being identified as the source of the problem. I don't know if it is being misidentified or if there is some deeper murkier story behind the outage. I just know that it is technically not possible for DNS to be responsible for a selective URL redirect.

I harbor no ill will toward FPN. I reached out earlier via email to offer any help I could. They thanked me cordially but say they're near the end of their troubles.

I am not really familiar with the history of moderation or any of the situations that some others here seem to be upset about, so I really can't have a legitimate opinion. I'm new to the fountain pen forums here and on FPN. It is unfortunate in my opinion that the site is down because there is a lot of valuable information on their boards for new collectors like me. If there are community problems as well, that is another misfortune.

[rwiker]

Having read most of this thread, it seems that somewhere along the line FPN are either not being entirely honest in their explanations as to why the board has been taken down, or have been misled.

The nameserver bit does not ring true for the following reason:
nameserver software on any major 'worth it's salt' provider is inherently secure, and if it was open to being hacked, you would have a fair chunk of the Internet community working on a fix for it.

That's true, and it happened in 2008, and also on a number of other occasions. There are still DNS servers on the internet that are susceptible to the DNS spoofability bug discovered in 2008.

In a nutshell:
What the nameserver does is provide an ip address for the site that you ar wanting to access, so that when I want to go to www.somesite.com it will provide the correct ip address for that site.
Every site on the Internet then has to have a UNIQUE ip address for it to work.

Not true - you can have many names resolving to a single ip address (virtual hosting), and also single names resolving to multiple ip addresses.

The original spec for nameservers require that you have 2 nameservers and that these should be placed in separate locations to provide for redundancy in case one goes down.

This means that if anything was changed, it was changed with the nameservers and this can ONLY BE DONE BY A PERSON WHO HAS ADMIN ACCESS rights to the account.
If this is so, then there is more in-fighting going on at FPN than their posts are admitting and perhaps they should rather have put up a message to say the site was having admin problems and would be back shortly instead of all the gobbledygook doublespeak they have posted.

This is just speculation based on the premise that all DNS servers run bug-free software, and cannot be accessed by hackers. There is ample evidence that this is not the case.

The latest posting that there will be a 24 hour delay for the name to be propogated through the nameservers is only true if the site has been moved to a new hosting service and has been given a new ip address.

No, the delay is based on the TTL (Time To Live) attribute of the DNS record(s)...

Also, the way the nameservers have been set up at present for the site will never work because you cannot use your own domain name for DNS address which they have at present (their nameservers are ns1.fountainpen... and ns2.fountain...) which is why I get a 'site not found error' when I try to access it.

I'm pretty sure that the domain definition also includes the ip addresses for ns1.fountainpennetwork.com etc.

By trying to hide the truth of the matter just means that they end up alienating the loyal contributers and users and when the truth does emerge it could do more damage than if they were just open about it at the outset. (To take and example from US histiry, if Nixon had admitted everything at the start, it would probably have all just blown over instead of ... .)

Hopefully they all pull themselves together and get the board back up and running or they will lose more people.
I see many FPN users have already made a move to an alternative site for their daily fix of penmania.

Just to be clear: I am also frustrated by the extended downtime, and I would have preferred a little more communication from the admins. On the other hand, I cannot see that speculation and conspiracy theories fill the need for information.

[rwiker]

I want to make sure and clarify that I was merely speaking earlier of the DNS system being identified as the source of the problem. I don't know if it is being misidentified or if there is some deeper murkier story behind the outage. I just know that it is technically not possible for DNS to be responsible for a selective URL redirect.

Well, given that DNS is a distributed, replicated system, it is entirely possible for two requests being served by different servers. It would also be possible to have all requests routed through a rogue web server, which in turn selectively redirects some urls. Hackers are pretty inventive, and I don't think we have enough information to conclude that DNS is not involved.

I harbor no ill will toward FPN. I reached out earlier via email to offer any help I could. They thanked me cordially but say they're near the end of their troubles.

I am not really familiar with the history of moderation or any of the situations that some others here seem to be upset about, so I really can't have a legitimate opinion. I'm new to the fountain pen forums here and on FPN. It is unfortunate in my opinion that the site is down because there is a lot of valuable information on their boards for new collectors like me. If there are community problems as well, that is another misfortune.

[nomadhacker]

Well, given that DNS is a distributed, replicated system, it is entirely possible for two requests being served by different servers. It would also be possible to have all requests routed through a rogue web server, which in turn selectively redirects some urls. Hackers are pretty inventive, and I don't think we have enough information to conclude that DNS is not involved.

Two subsequent requests from a single computer would go to the same IP. Your browser and computer (and ISP and several DNS helper layers in between) cache the DNS lookup info for a while. So you would not be getting multiple IPs from different URLs while browsing the site--unless they were going through reverse proxy or load-balancing software of some sort to manage server strain. And in that case, they would still be going to the same VIP before hitting the endpoint IPs. (DNS load balancing would serve up rotating IPs at the DNS server level, but would fall under the same issue as above about subsequent calls from the same client computer being cached in several layers)

Indeed, hackers who actually hijack the domain could set up a server that would selectively redirect traffic back to the original site, while keeping some traffic on their own servers. (though that would typically be done for the purposes of making it indistinguishible that the hijack had taken place to allow them to collect user logins or other sensitive info without the user knowing they were putting their info into a different site. Doing that for a 'loud' hack like this which is done for attention is a little strange.) However, in that case the redirect would be going in the opposite direction, as traceroute or other tools would show. Further, that still would preclude putting up a site banner page that grabs all that traffic and routing it to the Notice page that FPN has had up. The URLs that had been 'hijacked' would still be hijacked because they wouldn't ever hit the FPN server to get the redirect command to go to the banner page--since the selective redirect would be going in the opposite direction and would therefore be hitting the hijacking server first.

[whych]

@rwiker
Do a google for the RFC spec for nameservers and you will find that they require 2 and that they be hosted in separate buildings.

fountainpennetwork.com can NEVER be found with the ccurrently urrent way the dns entry is set up. ns1 and ns2 are separate machines that are part of fountainpennetwork.com domain. If I cannot resolve the domain name, I don't have a hope in hell of resolving any other machine linked to the domain.

Go back and read about dns and how it works.

TTL is a factor when the server ip address could change. If the ip address has not changed, as you imply, then it should still resolve to the old ip address.

If there are dns servers using old software, then they are certainly not part of a decent self-respecting commercial system and if you are using a public nameserver that uses dns server software that is known to be prone to hacking, you are crazy.

[nomadhacker]

@rwiker
Do a google for the RFC spec for nameservers and you will find that they require 2 and that they be hosted in separate buildings.

fountainpennetwork.com can NEVER be found with the ccurrently urrent way the dns entry is set up. ns1 and ns2 are separate machines that are part of fountainpennetwork.com domain. If I cannot resolve the domain name, I don't have a hope in hell of resolving any other machine linked to the domain.

Go back and read about dns and how it works.

TTL is a factor when the server ip address could change. If the ip address has not changed, as you imply, then it should still resolve to the old ip address.

If there are dns servers using old software, then they are certainly not part of a decent self-respecting commercial system and if you are using a public nameserver that uses dns server software that is known to be prone to hacking, you are crazy.

The RFC requires 'compliant' DNS setup to have two servers, and wants them ideally to be two different servers. However there's nothing really enforcing that. Lots of people set up a single DNS server and just two alias names--for example ns1 and ns2--pointing at the same machine on the same IP. Technically you can even set up a single server with a single name and it'll usually work for most things. Some email systems won't like it, but it's possible.

Also, you can indeed set up nameservers with your own domain to manage your own domain. I've done it myself for one of mine. You can set up ns1.mydomain.com and ns2.mydomain.com to manage mydomain.com. You register the nameservers by IP--not DNS--with the upstream servers. You then input the nameservers that you've registered upstream with your registrar's domain tools to indicate those are the ones to use. Like I said before, it's not really well explained, even the O'Reilly 'Nutshell' book doesn't really explain(one of their poorer ones, I'm afraid). But it's done all the time usually by companies wanting to brand their whole setup.

A quick look at dnsstuff's domain tools shows that FPN do indeed have some minor problems with the setup of their DNS servers. Mostly some courtesy requirements for routing management emails. Also their two dns servers don't reference each other. But just minor things really. Only things that some picky mail servers would maybe care about.

I can only speak to the technical explanation of DNS, as I deal with it quite a lot at my day job (at a registrar. Not the one that FPN uses I don't have any personal reason or evidence to say there's conspiracy. So I won't speak to that.

Though I agree with you that it is almost certainly not the DNS system to blame as stated.

[radaddict]

Well, if FPN is having DNS problems, we can speculate about any IP address changes or how the RFC spec plays into this, but we'd better keep that on the QT or we'll all be SOL. YMMV IIRC TTFN