Is it just me or is half the internet seem to be down? I can’t get to extremetech.com or parts of zdnet.com, and I just got a 500 error from blogger.com when trying to leave a comment on someone’s blog. What’s interesting was the message: “Please contact the server administrator, blogger@trakken.com and inform them of the time the error occurred, and anything you might have done that may have caused the error.” Trakken.com redirects to Neotonic, which according to its meta tag, ” Neotonic Trakken is a powerful web-based Online Customer Support system.” The domain is registered by David Jeske who has an email at Chat.net, a PHP-Nuke site that hasn’t been updated in two years. David worked at eGroups and Yahoo and then started Neotonic which signed Google as its first customer in 2001. If you dig a little deeper you can see what Trakken really is. The obvious conclusion to be drawn from all this is that Blogger is just a highly customized PHP-Nuke installation and should be released under the GPL. Someone contact the FSF.
I noticed slowdowns and problems with accessing some sites yesterday as well…
I’ve been having lots of trouble too. Mostly DNS servers have been going nuts it seems. :-\
Trakken isn’t used by Blogger, it’s used by for its Google’s companywide email support system (familiar to folk who file bugs on Gmail, Google Desktop Search, etc). Their emailed replies come back with headers like
Subject: Re: [#15500096] [Desktop-feedback] (no subject)
Message-ID: <#14.ec8340.15681897.416fa4a8.d38@google.trakken.com>
User-Agent: Neotonic Trakken/2.12.1
In-Reply-To: <200410151025.i9FAPYeh017090@mcbo26.prod.google.com>
…
Incidentally, the product is no longer available for evaluation, they seem to have been acquired by Google. If this is the case, then I guess Google would have no reason to share source, since it would be an not-for-sale “in-house” application.
Thanks for tracking down more info Prasenjeet. My “conclusion” wasn’t serious, it was just a joke.
I also was having a great deal of trouble with my own Blogspot/Blogger sites and posting comments on other blogspot sites a few days ago, maybe 10-12-04 or thereabouts.
I even went to some Google blogs and tried to get help or answers about it. I thought maybe Google was under attack by some evil genius computer fiend who loves Icerocket, A9, Clumpster, or whatever.
vaspers the grate {grind to powder with a harsh sound}
Actually this kind of use is permitted by the GPL, and is generally seen as a flaw in the GPL. It will be ‘fixed’ in GPL v3 and there already is a gpl based license which covers this. The point is Blogger uses PHP-Nuke (if it’s true) and isn’t distributing it. Since the GPL only covers distribution this would be totally allowed.
That was hilarious mat, thanks for making my smile. It’s a shame your humor surpasses some people. 🙂
*grins*
Cheers Matt. That sort of thing is just my odd sense of humour.
Side note: can’t say I noticed any of the slowdown that many others seem to have done…
Great work interweb detective 😛
Not been able to get your site, my own site of my host’s site all morning. Had a few random dead sites too.
Odd.
It’s several days later now, but it’s now 12:36am and I’ve just gotten the same error on Blogger that you described w/the same reference info.
This morning, I can access all of the other blog sites (i.e. “TypePad”), BUT NOT MINE. Very frustrating!