We are back!

The IMC network regained control of the DNS entry for indymedia.org

Websites and services are expected to be slowly coming back to the net as the routing data propagates. The cause of the shortage seems to have been that Dubster, the registrar of the domain decided to suspend it because they didn’t receive an answer for an email for two weeks. This is really funny, actually, a very stupid reason. Discussion began about the evaluation of the incident and the possible ways to avoid such things for the future.

ps: if you are wondering about the picture it is a semacode version of "Hello world!" cropped into a field.

If you are reading this page, then you probably know that Indymedia is down due to the primary nameservers being changed from NS2.RISEUP.NET and NS.LACKOF.ORG to NS1.BADWHOISSHUTDOWN.COM and NS2.BADWHOISSHUTDOWN.COM. People are presently investigating this change, however it is probably related to an ICANN whois data "inaccuracy" report (which, unfortunately, is a known tool that trolls have successfully used in the past to get sites they don't like taken down).

This page will be updated when more information becomes available. (Last update 2009-08-07 14:52 PM GMT)

How do I get indymedia.org back?

This section hopes to provide informative instructions on how to recover the indymedia.org zone while this mess gets sorted out.

Recovering indymedia.org using BIND

If you run your own nameserver like BIND, then it is very easy. Just add the following to your nnamed.conf:

zone "indymedia.org" {
type forward;
forwarders {
// ns2.riseup.net, ns.lackof.org
204.13.164.8; 204.13.164.202;
};
};

Save the config file and restart BIND. Provided that you are resolving your DNS through this BIND instance, indymedia.org should now be available to you. You may need to flush your DNS cache if your operating system has one. For example, on Windows, this can be done by doing ipconfig /flushdns in a Command Prompt.

Recovering indymedia.org using Unbound

If you run your own Unbound resolver, then it is very easy. Just add the following to your /etc/unbound/unbound.conf:

forward-zone:
name: "indymedia.org"
# ns2.riseup.net
forward-addr: 204.13.164.8
# ns.lackof.org
forward-addr: 204.13.164.202

Save the config file and restart Unbound. Provided that you are resolving your DNS through this Unbound instance, indymedia.org should now be available to you. You may need to flush your DNS cache if your operating system has one. For example, on Windows, this can be done by doing ipconfig /flushdns in a Command Prompt.

Home users

It has been reported that OpenDNS is working at present. This is probably because the DNS cache has not yet expired. To enable your computer for OpenDNS, go to the OpenDNS website, which has useful instructions for setting up your computer to use their nameservers.

You can also add the IPs for nameservers to your DNS server list, which are 204.13.164.8, and 204.13.164.202. This should work on most platforms without causing problems. (note: In Windows, to add more than 2 nameservers, the options to do so are under your Network Adapter's "TCP/IP advanced settings.")

lists.indymedia.org is dead, so where are we talking about this?

On the imc-tech-emerg list. We are also discussing the issue on IRC in #tech.

Home users behind firewall

There is a file with known domain name and IP address pairs. People who are blocked by firewall which can not access other dns server than internal one can use it pasting it at the end of /etc/hosts file on Unixen like Linux, etc. The windows user can paste it at end of c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts and reboot.

How do I access irc.indymedia.org?

The easiest is to use this alternative address: irc.indy.punk.eu.org

/server 209.51.169.94 6667 for non-SSL, and /server 209.51.169.94 +6697 for SSL. Most clients support SSL in the format previously mentioned and SSL is recommended when connecting to the IRC server.

The webchat interface is available, but you will need to accept the SSL certificate.

What can I do to help?

Refer people to this page if they ask why Indymedia is down.

Whatever you do, please avoid doing anything involving Dotster. Right now doing anything that could be construed as harmful or illegal towards Dotster is probably counter-productive, as amongst other reasons, there may be legal efforts involved to recover the domain name from them, so as a result we really don't particularly want to be doing anything that would jeopardize the situation. People are already reportedly in communication with Dotster about this problem.

There is an error on this page and/or I have a proposed change to make to this page.

Mention the change on #tech on the IRC server and I will try to update it as soon as I notice it. Prefixing your message with "nenolod:" will get my attention more quickly.