AR15.com down?

[Suck My Glock]

Just received a report that Arfcom was booted by Go-Daddy earlier today, but when I went there just now, I was redirected to AR15-backup.com where all seemed to be normal.

Anyone know if the report is accurate and Arfcom is simply dealing with it successfully?

[Suck My Glock]

From an IT tech weenie friend;...

Yup, they restored the site to a backup non GoDaddy server, and took their ICANN registration to a different DNS server. But they lost the servers on GoDaddy briefly today, and lost name resolution.

[Suck My Glock]

Along these lines, this begs the question;...Can AZS be disappeared again?

I think the answer is yes, unless the hosts here this time around have prepared like AR15.com did.

Here's a post on another forum I sometimes visit, where by my IT tech weenie friend. Read it carefully.

Things are moving very quickly. The tech gods have dropped all pretense and are engaged in a wholesale attack on the internet. Not content with silencing the President of the US, they are shutting down entire social networks.

There is a very real chance that the internet will be shut down. I shudder to write that, as not long ago I would have instantly dismissed it as tinfoil-hat material. No more.
They probably won't physically disable the internet. Too many emergency services, commerce, and government functions are completely dependent on the internet. But they can poison the DNS servers.

I'm not going to give a full explanation of DNS - there are others here who can do it better than I can, and plenty available (for now!!) on the web.The tl;dr version is that when you type a URL, a system of linked servers called DNS - Domain Name System - gets a query and provides an IP address (xxx.yyy.zzz.aaa) that corresponds to that URL. This a networked system of servers, not one machine. When you move a website to a new host with a new IP address, it can take the DNS system 24 hours or so to propagate the new IP address through all the DNS servers.

The same tech giants that are destroying competing social networks have control of a fair chunk of the DNS system. They can disappear websites they don't like by poisoning the DNS servers. If they enter false IP addresses they could, for example, direct clairewolfe.com/blog to a scary-looking FBI webpage claiming the site has been seized or shutdown or both (or worse.) The site would still be there, but you can't get to it by typing a URL.

There is one thing I thought I could do to protect against this. Every computer operating system includes a file called hosts.txt. It's from the very early days of the internet, before DNS servers were widely available. An entry in hosts.txt is just a dotted-quad IP address followed by a site name.

If I want to make sure I can reach clairewolfe.com and clairescabal.com, I could start with a hosts.txt that looks like this:

# Copyright (c) 1993-2009 Microsoft Corp.
#
# This is a sample HOSTS file used by Microsoft TCP/IP for Windows.
#
# This file contains the mappings of IP addresses to host names. Each
# entry should be kept on an individual line. The IP address should
# be placed in the first column followed by the corresponding host name.
# The IP address and the host name should be separated by at least one
# space.
#
# Additionally, comments (such as these) may be inserted on individual
# lines or following the machine name denoted by a '#' symbol.
#
# For example:
#
# 102.54.94.97 rhino.acme.com # source server
# 38.25.63.10 x.acme.com # x client host

# localhost name resolution is handled within DNS itself.
# 127.0.0.1 localhost
# ::1 localhost

# --
198.252.105.95 clairewolfe.com
198.252.105.94 clairescabal.com


However, I've tried this and found it isn't that simple. I use the cmd window in Windows to run the commandNSLOOKUP clairewolfe.comto get those IP addresses. But when I enter them (and several permutations, like adding /member-login) I get errors.

I'm probably missing something very basic. Would any of the IP and net-savvy people care to enlighten me?
I also tried the command
ipconfig /displaydns > dnscache.txt
and got a dismaying record. My dns cache was essentially all google nameservers.

Using ipconfig /flushdns cleared most of that, but I still can't get to Claires blog or this forum using dotted-quad IP addresses.

[iammaxwell]

I actually had trouble see any threads on AZS the other night. Could get to any menu, but when I tried an actual topic it would timeout with server error. Pretty sure it wasn't on my end, because everything else on my phone worked perfect.

[landon]

I actually had trouble see any threads on AZS the other night. Could get to any menu, but when I tried an actual topic it would timeout with server error. Pretty sure it wasn't on my end, because everything else on my phone worked perfect.

I also have had the same problem multiple times.

[Pipedoc]

I had the same issue last night.

[Noshoot]

https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/new ... s-gun-site

Amazon partner GoDaddy boots gun site from its servers

Web hosting service GoDaddy has booted gun site Arfcom from its servers.

“ARFCOM IS DOWN. We've been booted from GoDaddy and are looking for an alternative solution,” the site announced in a Facebook post.

The post encourages users to bookmark a backup URL, noting that their main URL will soon be offline.

The news comes as Big Tech companies have created controversy over their banning of the social media network Parler, which bills itself as a platform more open to free speech.

Many conservatives began flocking to Parler after President Trump was banned from both Facebook and Twitter, which cited concerns over him inciting violence following last week’s siege of the U.S. Capitol by a crowd of his supporters.

Apple and Google removed the platform from their app stores. Amazon soon followed the trend by kicking Parler off its cloud-based server, with all three companies citing Parler’s lack of violent content moderation as the reason for the move.

Parler went offline late Sunday as the company searches for an alternative to host its platform.

GoDaddy, a popular domain registration company, announced in 2018 that the company was moving the bulk of its infrastructure to Amazon Web Services. The multiyear deal makes the service a partner in selling some of GoDaddy’s products.

Arfcom, which bills itself as “the world’s largest online firearm community,” will now be forced into similar circumstances as Parler.

Neither GoDaddy nor Arfcom immediately responded to a Washington Examiner request for comment.

[Gunslinger808]

They’re now in the process of migrating over to a more friendly server system, and will be fine, transition might take up to a week.
The main problem was they were hosted on Go Daddy and Amazon servers, which instituted a DNS against them.

I stopped going there at least a year ago due to a very negative LEO stance including from one staff member and one moderator, but I wish them nothing but the best of luck in these unsettled times.

This can happen to any site including this one, if you have friends or others that you keep in contact with strictly through AZS, it would be a good time to secure other sources of comms with them.
I highly doubt we’re in any danger here, but never depend on just one line of communication.

On a side note, if you don’t like ARFCOM, that’s fine, but this is not the time or place to bash, we’re all in this together, and negative comments are not welcome.

ETA...
NoShoot posted while I was typing.

[XJThrottle]

I got booted from there long ago...

[AZ_Five56]

Along these lines, this begs the question;...Can AZS be disappeared again?

I had the same concern last summer, so I messaged Admin about it. At the time, he said that there was a new backup of the site every 12 hours, but I don't know what that means if the hosting company boots the site. Is the backup a local copy that's safe from the grip of GoDaddy and the like, or can the backup be wiped also? Or is the site self-hosted?

I'm a relatively new member to AZS, so I wasn't around in the old days. My impression from what others had written about its demise was that the site owner lost interest and just stopped renewing the hosting. Someone else please chime in if that's completely wrong.

[Gunslinger808]

I truly doubt it, the new owner of this site takes great care, and has a love for this site.
The loss of the old AZS was due to exactly what you stated, it went into disrepair and a lack of attention.
I’m not privy to the specifics, but really I doubt our new admin will let this site go without a heck of a fight.

[Noshoot]

I got booted from there long ago...

I’ve been suspended 2-3 times over there in 18 yrs.

But.....

There’s a sh!t ton of good information over there, so I’m always reading in both the AZHTF as well as some of the other subs.

[admin]

I work in IT for my day job, so I am very familiar with what happened with AR15.com and what they did to address it short-term.

Can it happen here? Short answer: Yep. While I can institute a static IP with my hosting provider (which is not a big cloud provider; ie - not AWS, Azure, Google, etc - and no, not GoDaddy either), there is a cost to it. And doing that would simply allow you to go to an IP address in lieu of the domain name. DNS is essentially just a service on the internet that translates the web sites we visit from IP addresses that look like 68.105.28.11 into something we can easily remember for convenience. GoDaddy essentially deliberately prevented AR15.com's DNS from working during the outage. If you knew AR15.com's IP address (actually, they have 3 front ends that are load-balanced due to the traffic the site gets), you could still get to it.

ar15.com. 5 IN A 3.20.37.167
ar15.com. 5 IN A 3.139.193.203
ar15.com. 5 IN A 3.138.255.236

While I'd love to be able to build AZS in a resilient and redundant fashion with full DR (Disaster Recovery) and a quick RTO, this site is run entirely at my own expense with the help of a few generous patrons who throw a few dollars to help each month. This site generates no profit, so anything I do is at my own expense. To that end, I do take twice-daily backups which are stored at the hosting provider (for quick restores) and off-site for security. However, the site doesn't have a DR environment or a cold/off-site copy ready to spin up - to have that would more than double operational costs and complexity.

When I first built AZS (the old one, a LONG time ago), I actually built it on my own system at home and hosted it through my home router. That was when most ISP's didn't restrict or prevent their customers from running a web site from home and DSL was synchronous, meaning that I had just as much upload as I did download. Today, most ISP's heavily restrict upload bandwidth to prevent hosting web sites.

The internet today is heavily distributed and it would be very difficult for Big Tech to bring down access to all sites like AR15.com, AZS, etc. Could it be done; yes - but it would either need to be vastly coordinated at a level like nothing before we've ever seen, or it would be done in waves with the big stuff first, and then gradually move on to the rest.

Given the influence that the players have (Google, Twiter, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, Amazon, politicians in power), it would not be too much of a stretch to have them exert influence to hardware vendors (Cisco, HP, Dell, etc) and major internet backbones/routes (Verizon, TimeWarner, etc) to not sell or support environments that host undesirable content, or to de-prioritize, blacklist or block entirely, certain web sites or worse, entire ISP's who allow routing or traffic to those undesirable web sites.

It's scary to think about and it is certainly not something that could be done in a day or a week, but it's certainly more plausible than I would have ever thought if you'd asked me 3 months ago. I know that doesn't quell any fears, but I also know that if all that were to happen, you'd have a lot of rogue sites that would pop-up and it'd be like playing whack-a-mole for them to try to stop it all.

Be prudent. Unfortunately, in the world of today, it's pretty much impossible to be involved economically or have a job and not use some aspect of the Big Tech companies I mentioned earlier, but it's also worth having a backup plan, just in case.

Make sure you have a free Protonmail account.

Consider downloading Tor while you still can (https://www.torproject.org/).

Consider changing from Google to DuckDuckGo for web searches...

We're in a whole new world and the next couple years are going to be very interesting to say the least.

[Vyadmirer]

This is crazy. The culture war is going hot.

[deanq]

WOW! I'm quite the Luddite, so I had no idea!.....WOW.