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Aaron Landry's post exposing the Coleman campaign's "thousands of hits crashed our website!" stunt for what it is -- a lie.
Domains do not change their target IP address on their own -- it takes human input to change the address to which a domain refers when it's asked for content. 1.1.1.1 is not a commonly used default IP address, at least not in any domain management system I've ever seen (and I've seen a few).
To be fair to Coleman's staff and lapdog bloggers, there is a second option that's not "you're flat-out lying" -- gross negligence on the part of their web operation. This "damned-if-you-do-damned-if-you-don't" choice was in full display in Connecticut in 2006, when Joe Lieberman's campaign falsely accused Ned Lamont's of having hacked their website, when in fact it was their own fault their server failed. Oops.
If this was a stunt that Coleman's team is using to generate news, a smarter thing to do would have been to remove the actual machine from the network -- that is, leave the domain pointing to the IP address that identifies the server containing the campaign's website media, but unplug that machine. But who knows what else is on that machine? FLS Connect's own website? That of nother organization for whom they work, perhaps? That too would have left telltale footprints in the public record, and ultimately been found out for what it is -- either nefarious plot, or incompetency. One or the other, and nothing else.
The third, and perhaps a reasonably likely option, is that someone intentionally took the site offline, resetting its target IP address to 1.1.1.1 to perform maintenance or protect their servers from a crush of Drudge-linking traffic. But if so, why the public spin that it was a crash? Something doesn't add up, no matter what Coleman's spin.
The bottom line here is this: Coleman's campaign website did NOT fail because of some ethereal crush of web traffic looking for information on rejected ballots. Whether by malfeasance or incompetence, the fact that colemanforsenate.com was/is not pointing to the Coleman campaign's website is the fault of the Coleman campaign alone.
The fact that they're trying to spin it as some drastic turnaround in their ridiculous election contest is just plain sad.
Update: Tony Webster puts it all together in the comment thread on Aaron's post: Did the site crash because it was linked on Drudge Report? No, this campaign is getting plenty of attention in the national media. It's on a dedicated server in a Twin Cities-based datacenter with peering with major backbone providers.
Did the site crash because the web developers preemptively launched a new feature without doing proper testing in a non-production environment? Maybe, intentional or accidental?-?but it's deceptive to use that as a basis to falsify traffic.
Is changing DNS to an address outside of your control for a day a reasonable use of best practices in mitigating traffic? No, reverting to the old site or displaying a temporary page would have been better.
If the database caused the crashes because of human error, I can go on and on about what they should have done: version control, test and production done separately, lowered TTL's and more.
But ultimately?-?if they had time to write a press release and distribute it via MDE, they had time to fix a small database error for a functionality that is really just a list of names.
It's deceptive and opportunistic at best, a complete fabrication at worst.
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