Parliament is Unresponsive
Posted by Jacques Chester on Saturday, January 10, 2009
Dave Bath emailed me to say that the Australian Parliament’s website is down. For techie minded amongst you, it’s not responding to pings from Dave, my home computer or some virtual servers I can access in the US.
Here it is: your invitation to make the nerdiest jokes you like about the causes and/or meaning of this failure.
Speaking for myself, I think it’s an overheating problem. What with all the hot air …
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This entry was posted on Saturday, January 10th, 2009 at 5:12 PM and filed under Humour, IT and Internet.
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I’m wondering if they have just uploaded all the Hansard or whatever with the “think of the children” blah blah…. and the test content filter has picked up all the keywords.
Now THAT would be funny!
And I’m just wondering if I was on line when the failure occurred MUCH earlier today (documented here).
Posted on 10-Jan-09 at 5:17 pm | PermalinkA quick look at their whois record shows that their primary DNS server is ns1.optus.net.au, which doesn’t respond to ping. Maybe that’s the cause of their woes.
Posted on 10-Jan-09 at 5:20 pm | PermalinkNot Telstra? ANGRY AMIGOS! Surely aph.gov.au and australia.gov.au have the same primary DNS or at least run by non-deadly enemies.
But I’m getting “Pinging aph.gov.au [202.14.81.230] with 32 bytes of data:” so the DNS works, and a traceroute from the US gets as far as crowsnest with the whois… oh dear, the map is pointing into the middle of a paddock outside Canberra (must be all the Bulls**t).
http://202.14.81.230/ times out too.
australia.gov.au still up.
We’re not under attack from Singapore? (Oh no, they run everything here already!)
Posted on 10-Jan-09 at 5:27 pm | PermalinkNerdy joke: Parliament is a total loss
Proof:
Posted on 10-Jan-09 at 7:38 pm | PermalinkC:\Users\bathdt>ping aph.gov.auPinging wopared.aph.gov.au [202.14.81.230] with 32 bytes of data:
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Request timed out.
Ping statistics for 202.14.81.230:
Packets: Sent = 4, Received = 0, Lost = 4 (100% loss)
(And why does wp automatically put a http colon slash slash on the front?
Posted on 10-Jan-09 at 7:40 pm | PermalinkJC: Can you put a nbsp just prior to the www in my previous comment to get rid of the “I know better than you do” autoformatting?
I took off ‘www’, apparently Wordpress looks on that as an invitation to step in. Usually sensible.
Posted on 10-Jan-09 at 7:42 pm | PermalinkThe minister against communications finally found someone who’d agree to trial his filter.
Posted on 10-Jan-09 at 7:52 pm | Permalink[...] The implications of the federal parliamentary website being out of action (see my earlier post and Club Troppo for more info) are serious, whatever the cause, because not only was it offline for 12 hours or [...]
Posted on 11-Jan-09 at 12:58 pm | PermalinkUpdate:
aph.gov.au up, but https://senate.aph.gov.au submissions application still stumbling.
Diagnostics and details on how the check for yourself here
Posted on 12-Jan-09 at 1:55 pm | PermalinkPriceless DB priceless
Posted on 12-Jan-09 at 6:25 pm | PermalinkI got a comment on the original post that claims to be from an aph.gov.au email and claims a scheduled power outage.
To me, there should have been fairly simple measures taken (like redirecting to a static “don’t panic” page). I discuss this sort of thing and a few other options in a response comment.
It still doesn’t explain the senate submissions system crashing your session or being dog slow (a minute for half a page of text) as outlined here.
The dog ate their business continuity plan.
Any comments over there from IT professionals, particularly EAs, middleware gurus and Business Continuity types are VERY welcome.
Posted on 13-Jan-09 at 2:58 pm | PermalinkJacques - I’ll bet green money that yer the only person in the Universe who noticed.
Posted on 13-Jan-09 at 5:13 pm | PermalinkI’ll take that bet. Dave Bath noticed it too.
Posted on 13-Jan-09 at 5:21 pm | PermalinkJC: Thanks - can we split the winnings? Thanks too (which Adrien must have missed) for acknowledging me in the first words of this post.
Green money. I’m redgreen colorblind. Do we have any green money?
AdrienSword: I noticed a lot else besides. See my recent “Parliamentary dog ate my homework” post. I’m after everyone’s thoughts before I send a smellogram (de-odorized with my tact-checker, of course, so the only smell is between the lines) to the web managers for aph and the senate, so would appreciate any comments back on Balneus so they are easier to assimilate.
Posted on 13-Jan-09 at 10:18 pm | Permalink