Jerry A. Taylor is the city manager of Tutttle, Oklahoma and boasts 22 years in computer systems engineering and operation. When Jerry has a computer problem he wants action! Now!

The heartland turned vicious this week when an Oklahoma town threatened to call in the FBI because its web site was hacked by Linux maker Cent OS. Problem is CentOS didn’t hack Tuttle’s web site at all. The city’s hosting provider had simply botched a web server.

CentOs tried to help Mr. Taylor with his problem, even though their software was not the cause. A sample of the correspondence between Tuttle’s Taylor and CentOs developer Johnny Hughes:

Taylor: Who gave you permission to invade my website and block me and anyone else from accessing it???
Please remove your software immediately before I report it to government officials!!
I am the City Manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma.
-
Hughes: CentOS is an operating system. It is probably installed on the computer that runs your website.
-
Taylor: Get this web site off my home page!!!!!
It is blocking access to my website!!!!~!
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Hughes: It is not a website … it is the operating system.

I would be glad to help you configure your webserver.

Do you own the machine that your web site is on, or is it at a hosting
provider.

If it is at a provider, they need to properly configure their webserver.

If it is on your machine, your apache needs to be properly configured.
-
Taylor: I do not want this software!!!! This is the City of Tuttle, Oklahoma. Get rid of this software!!!!!
Second notice! … Unless this software is removed I will file a complaint with the FBI.

Hughes: I/We didn’t install any software … I am trying to tell you that.

I am asking you as nicely as I possible can to explain what the problem is. …

You may certainly call the FBI if you want. I may call some law
enforcement agency or attorney myself if you don’t stop throwing around
accusations and stop threatening me without just cause.

Please, for the love of God, either let me help you or talk to a
computer administrator who can help you with your problem.
-
Taylor: This a message to notify you that your webpage has blocked an “Official”
website that is used to provide public information regarding City Council
meetings including notifying the public of the agendas. Failure to provide
the agendas on the City’s website is a violation of the open records act of
Oklahoma. You claim no responsibility but the city did not subscribe to your
software and the city did not authorize you to display it when the city’s
website is selected.

You have officially been notified and given an opportunity to correct the
situation without legal intervention. The rest is up to you!
-
Hughes: Stop with the FBI already.
-
Taylor: Please talk to the person who controls the computers … or give me a
name and an e-mail address and I will talk to them.

If someone who is computer literate doesn’t take care of this situation
I will be forced to send these ridiculous e-mails to your local media.

With 22 years of computer engineering and operation, Tuttle’s city manager has got to be one of the most computer literate people in Oklahoma!

Mr. Hughes has the patience of a saint:

I’ve repeatedly asked you to contact your service provider
or your network administrator, you have persisted to instead harass me.
I have repeatedly offered to help you fix your issue, if you would just
provide me with information. You have chosen neither provide me with
information or contact your hosting provider … so I decided to see if
I could find some of the information myself.

I found the website that you are having problems with by looking at
http://www.Tuttle-OK.gov/ and I saw an e-mail address of
cityoftuttle.org … so I went to www.cityoftuttle.org and I see the
problem.

As I tried to explain to you before, that page is displayed when the
webserver in question is not properly configured.

The IP address that is returned from a name lookup of
www.cityoftuttle.org is 65.77.67.7. That is the IP address of your
server.

Doing more research, I have found that the site in question is hosted by
Vidia Communications. If you look at this page

http://uptime.netcraft.com/up/graph/?host=www.vidiacom.com

you will plainly see that Vidia Communications uses CentOS as the
operating system for their server.

So, though I have told you again and again that you need to contact your
service provider and tell them of your problem, you obviously would
rather threaten me and my group.

Now, for the last time … contact your web server provider, Vidia
Communications, and tell them that they have a misconfiguration on the
server that they are hosting your website on.

While you are at it, why don’t you ask Vidia Communications why it is
that they choose CentOS to host your webserver on.

So you see Mr. Taylor, you ARE using my free operating system to run
your website, you are doing so by choice, it is a configuration error by
the person who choose to install the software and if you would have done
what I asked you to your website would have been up by now.

Let me conclude by saying that it is very hard for me NOT to send this
e-mail and all the other correspondence between you and I to the
Tuttle Times.

Then, one more time from Tuttle’s Taylor:

The problem has been resolved by VIDIA who used to host the City website. …

I am sorry that we had to go through the process and accusations to get the
problem resolved. It could have been resolved a lot quicker if the initial
correspondence with you provided the helpful information that was
transmitted in the last messages.

Any volunteers to help Taylor start his blog?

This entry was posted on Saturday, March 25th, 2006 at 10:50 am and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.