The joy of the .us domain, part N
My weblog lives on a few different domain names (weblog.pell.portland.or.us and weblog.pell.portland.or.us) and has been sitting there for several years without basically any maintenance except for when one of my nameservers has the network re-IPed out from under it.
But today a fun thing happened. A friend sent me a piece of mail saying that my web server had been hacked and weblog.pell.portland.or.us was returning bogus web pages (some sort of search engine portal, not the tsfr that nobody knows and loves) and after a round of checking for breakins on my nameservers, I finally found that if I did some of the net-based dns lookups I’d get bogus results (an A record instead of the expected CNAME) most of the time.
So a more exhaustive search was undertaken, and after a considerable period of time I discovered that of the three nameservers for the portland.or.us domain, one of them – the New! Improved! thermal.ies.lafayette.in.us.com one – was returning the address of a search engine portal for every .us query it was given (for other domains it was just not returning anything.)
Now that’s a feature. And it’s better than that; every single subdomain under the .us.com tree resolves to this search engine farm. Now that’s a quality hack, only slightly diminished by the teeny detail that basically nobody uses the old kludgy Postel-style geographic dns anymore.
There’s certainly nothing I can do about this, but I’ve let the domain administrator for portland.or.us know that his newest nameserver is terminally broken and that it might be a good idea to stop using it (not that it ever worked; the old thermal.ies.lafayette.in.us nameserver that portland.or.us used to use had been broken for years – possibly even a decade – and it didn’t ever make the domain less usable.)
I wonder how long it will take to fix this?