
Nsa.gov is down - deft0nes
http://nsa.gov/
======
migrantgeek
I don't mean to be inflammatory but what's the purpose of HN postings
regarding sites being down?

I've never actually been to nsa.gov and would have never known it was down.
I'm sure most of the readers are in the same boat.

Even if I did access the site on a regular basis, I'd realize it was down and
come back later when it might be back up.

Sometimes my favorite coffee shop is closed. I don't walk around the
neighborhood carrying a poster stating that fact.

I've just never understood the purpose of these postings. "facebook" is down,
"netflix" is down, etc. It doesn't actually accomplish anything.

~~~
wavesounds
Well for the NSA it could be related to the most recent news (maybe its a DDOS
by the Germans?!), thus its 'breaking news' about a hot story a lot of HN
readers are interested in.

For the other sites, its very rare they go down and its the best and brightest
working to keep them up so if they went down the reason why is probably
something that would interest the whole community.

~~~
migrantgeek
"maybe its a DDOS by the Germans?!"

That would be newsworthy however no evidence of this was presented. It was
simply "this thing is down now".

If a large site goes down, I would like to know what happened. I'd be
interested to learn from the mistakes of others.

This isn't the case with this posting or others like it.

Posts of this ilk rarely have any more information than I could have received
from a curl command.

~~~
wavesounds
I get your point but perhaps theres a sys admin monitoring a DNS server
somewhere and realizes theres a bunch of unusual traffic then on his break he
checks HN and realizes the NSA site is down, he then does a little
investigation and wolla he connects the dots and has something he can teach
the rest of us. It's collective intelligence if you will :-)

------
zombio
Mandatory relevant XKCD: [http://xkcd.com/932/](http://xkcd.com/932/)

~~~
GhotiFish
I never understood that comic. You would think preventing traffic reaching a
website would be harder than tearing down a poster.

edit: Wrong direction.

~~~
8ig8
Hacking the NSA website is not hacking the NSA. Hacking a website is
relatively easy and not that interesting to people who deal with servers day-
to-day.

~~~
GhotiFish
Right, see. When you say "Relatively easy" do you mean: "it is just subtly
easier that compromising the NSA itself" or: "I'm surprised it doesn't happen
every day"

because I think you meant the former.

~~~
isaacb
I suspect the difference between hacking the NSA website and hacking the NSA's
central computer system is more than subtle

------
MarcosBL
Oh, i just meet you, and this is crazy, but here is
[http://www.digitalattackmap.com/#anim=1&color=0&country=ALL&...](http://www.digitalattackmap.com/#anim=1&color=0&country=ALL&time=16003&view=map)
so DoS maybe ?

------
gry
It sure is. It's been down for hours.

    
    
        http://www.isitdownrightnow.com/nsa.gov.html
    

Funny thing is, outages for GitHub and its ilk hit HN in minutes. Either way,
the transparency in the post-mortem is more valuable and telling than the
outage. Organizations need to prove themselves with transparency to build and
earn trust.

Yet, one of these things is not like the other.

~~~
ams6110
The public nsa.gov site is just another government website. It's not like
they're running it out of one of their secret data centers.

~~~
gry
Agreed. I commented on the organization. One expects the NSA to provide a sub-
par post-mortem.

a) it is the NSA and

b) it is a "marketing" website

I'm not sure what utility www.nsa.gov provides beyond a mission statement.
Never was curious before, now I am. :)

\--

edit: clarity

~~~
rat87
[http://web.archive.org/web/20131012024556/http://www.nsa.gov...](http://web.archive.org/web/20131012024556/http://www.nsa.gov/)

------
earthrise
It's www.NSA.gov NOT NSA.gov.

www.NSA.gov IS up, at least for me.

Edit: I just talked with my American friend and it apparently really is down
for them. It works for me up in Canada, though, at 23.6.100.226.

~~~
yeukhon
and I get this:

Invalid URL The requested URL "/", is invalid.

Reference #9.c0b31bb8.1382761672.701091f

~~~
earthrise
Yeah, you have to have 'Host: www.nsa.gov' in your request.

$ telnet 23.6.100.226 80

GET / HTTP/1.1

Host: www.nsa.gov

[press Enter twice]

Or you can add www.nsa.gov with that IP to your hosts file, if you reallllly
need access to it.

~~~
yeukhon
right www.nsa.gov is up, but nsa.gov is not.

How is that even possible? Shouldn't browser fill in www anyway?

~~~
dsl
nsa.gov and www.nsa.gov are two different hosts as far as DNS is concerned.
They can and often do point to different places. This is a good example.
www.nsa.gov is an alias to Akamai (a large CDN), and nsa.gov points directly
to an NSA owned machine (because for technical reasons you can't have an alias
or CNAME at the zone apex), people usually configure these machines to
redirect to the www hostname.

Browsers should never "fill in" www, because as I pointed out, www might be a
completely different host or service.

~~~
yeukhon
This is nice to know (and to everyone who have answered me so far), thanks!

I always think www.domain.com resolves to one of the ips and domain.com should
too. Thanks!

------
pontifier
For some reason more people than normal have been hitting my redirect in the
last couple days. [http://stats.itanimulli.com](http://stats.itanimulli.com) I
dont think 20k could bring down the nsa, but its still strange.

------
krenoten
Their apex has been up and down since the stories broke.

~~~
aspensmonster
Yep. I noticed the domain going flaky in August
([http://aspensmonster.com/2013/08/23/nsa-gov-is-down-
friday-a...](http://aspensmonster.com/2013/08/23/nsa-gov-is-down-friday-
august-23-2013-0330-cst-0930-gmt/)). That time, it looked like the Akamai Edge
network ended up serving it for a while.

------
Apocryphon
Maybe it's for temporary maintenance as they ready the public for exciting and
scandalous new wiretapping targets.

------
m52go
Word on the street is that it's supposed to be back up and working smoothly by
late November.

------
pit
It's back up.

------
dotBen
Hooray?

------
conformal
it's a decoy.

or it might be a decoy decoy... =)

