Backdoor, IP change

[jimmyk83]

Just wondered though -- is it better/worse to sell out in an hour, rather than 3 or 4? Personally I'd rather that they spread it out over a few hours, so that the weak and timid would give up early.

[Got mine about 10 minutes before it closed]

[eFestivals]

Does anyone know if this was a cock-up

I know for certain it was cock-up.

[eFestivals]

Meanwhile, whilst bathing in adulation, forgot to tell anyone that by keeping the manual host entry in place you were halving your chances of getting connection to servers.

I posted to say that the problem had been fixed and that hosts file hack would (then) lessen your chances of success.

I can only put the info out there, I can't make people read it.

[tumbles]

. I know nothing about seetickets but cant beleive they didnt do some load balace testing before the event.. A nice little window of oportunity was 'discovered' and before they could make the required change the 'free' IP address was disclosed.. Nice result all round. Seetickets dont care because a sell out was guaranteed..Meanwhile, whilst bathing in adulation, forgot to tell anyone that by keeping the manual host entry in place you were halving your chances of getting connection to servers.. Pretty shabby all round I recon

Edited October 8, 2012 by tumbles

[tumbles]

I know for certain it was cock-up.

[simont123]

Really dissapointed with Seetickets this year.....I got to the payment page 5 times and it bombed me out/timed out on every single go after I entered my card details etc.

We have a lot of sad people now not able to go. It shouldnt really be able to happen once youre in the site but ive been lucky the past 7 times so cant really complain.

[eFestivals]

I would imagine that someone is likely to get a disaplinary for it, it's pretty bad. I can understand why it happened, if you work in IT/Networking typing 192.168.x.x is almost done without thinking.

it's a big and unnecessary cock-up - but like you I completely understand how an IT geek would make that cock-up ... one of the efests servers has an IP address that starts with 194 too, and I often type 192 without thinking. If you're used to working with 192.168.x.x addresses - which most IT peeps are - then it's an easy mistake to make.

So I'm not sure it should be a disciplinary. It's just as much the case that see should have procedures in place so that such things are checked by a second pair of eyes.

What is very weird is that a week ago the DNS was set up correctly, which this post shows...

[parsonjack]

Could it have been a deliberate internal hack by someone in See to give a group of people in the know an advantage?

[eFestivals]

Could it have been a deliberate internal hack by someone in See to give a group of people in the know an advantage?

I'm starting to wonder that myself.

[Jie Bie]

I'm starting to wonder that myself.

[parsonjack]

That had also crossed my mind. However, if it was an "inside job" you would think that whoever was in the know and using the quiet server would have had their tickets bought in minutes, meaning the cock-up could have been fixed by 9.15am (at the latest) before anyone would have noticed.

The fact the error sat in place for at least a full 45 minutes suggests that it wasn't intentional, although that may itself be an elaborate double bluff!

[artl]

LOL and easy to see why they made the typo too. 194.168 vs 192.168 [probably only understood by an IT sort] - love these people who announce "farce" when some bod makes a minor error. - and it actually made no difference - it was corrected, so unless you gave up trying after an hour or so [in which case i guess you will have changed your mind about going] you would still have had the same chance as all the rest ...

[tumbles]

LOL and easy to see why they made the typo too. 194.168 vs 192.168 [probably only understood by an IT sort] - love these people who announce "farce" when some bod makes a minor error. - and it actually made no difference - it was corrected, so unless you gave up trying after an hour or so [in which case i guess you will have changed your mind about going] you would still have had the same chance as all the rest ...

[mikeb]

That had also crossed my mind. However, if it was an "inside job" you would think that whoever was in the know and using the quiet server would have had their tickets bought in minutes, meaning the cock-up could have been fixed by 9.15am (at the latest) before anyone would have noticed.

The fact the error sat in place for at least a full 45 minutes suggests that it wasn't intentional, although that may itself be an elaborate double bluff!

Edited October 8, 2012 by mikeb

[Paulvw]

It seems like it was a gamble unless you knew what you were doing. I didn't! made the change and still managed to get tickets for 2 groups of people just after 10am. From the comments, it would seem that with the host file changed I was operating on a 50% chance from the time that they fixed it.

I guess that alerting people to it possibly alerted See tickets that there was an error so they then corrected and ease the load on the other server. This probably gave me the opportunity to make the link to the server as the load would I guess have then been shared across 2 servers.

In any case, Thank you Neil you also saved the day in 2004 with the Freya link after trying all night. I've sent you a small donation to say thanks.

[tumbles]

Hmmm, doesn't it mostly depend on the way DNS system works in general as to how long it took to update rather than the speed at which See actually corrected the error ? DNS is generally cached so far as most users are concerned and any update can take a dog's age to propagate depending on the TTL (or whatever) that was set initially. A cached copy of the dodgy DNS record could have been totally valid for anything from several minutes to several days/weeks before ultimately being refreshed with the corrected info following the next lookup on the authoritative server(s).

Good old See some say ... others tell the truth ! I still worship Goddess Freya from the last time See managed to do something remarkably similar but it has to said that worshiping a stupid IP address just wouldn't be the same somehow

Edited October 8, 2012 by tumbles

[GingerRock]

Some guy's analysis/opinions of the DNS thing http://bitplane.net/...istration-2013/

Edited October 8, 2012 by GingerRock

[eFestivals]

Some guy's analysis/opinions of the DNS thing http://bitplane.net/...istration-2013/

he's not right with all his assumptions tho.

[Jie Bie]

he's not right with all his assumptions tho.

[tumbles]

Some guy's analysis/opinions of the DNS thing http://bitplane.net/...istration-2013/

Edited October 8, 2012 by tumbles

[ninjatrout]

Cock-up or not, it allowed a lot of us to get tickets quicker, so I for one salute the guy or gal who made the 'cock-up'!! And thanks goes to eFests for posting about it on Twitter!

[Pinhead]

Some ISPs can cache DNS settings for weeks. We recently had to change our IP range here in work and for some people accessing the message boards we host it took up to 5 days for there ISP to finally resolve to the new addresses.

[ukdaasfan]

It's easily done. Happens on our hosted platform more often that it should. As for the IP not difficult to find, just do an nslookup.

Ben-Shepherds-MacBook-Pro:etc bshepherd$ nslookup glastonbury.seetickets.com

Server: xxx.xxx.x.xxx

Address: xxx.xxx.x.xxx#53

Non-authoritative answer:

glastonbury.seetickets.com canonical name = seetickets.com.

Name: seetickets.com

Address: 194.168.202.202

Name: seetickets.com

Address: 194.168.202.201

If you monitored the request being sent you'd have noticed the stuff up and could adjust. Luckily for reason to long and boring to go into my TTL was set to 0. Which might have explained why I had no issues getting a ticket. Nice to know to check next time I am having an issue.

[tumbles]

What you do is a few days before hand you go in and set the TTL to a very low figure and allow that to propagate. Then when you come to make the actual A record changes, the propagation of the new data is much quicker. Afterwards, you set the TTL back to your confortable level for caching.

[gooner1990]

I have a genuine interest in what the 'cock up' was, how people got round it and all that, but have no idea what most of you are talking about.

Any chance of a retards version for the not-so technical of us?