North American Network Operators Group
Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical

Re: 143.228.0.0/16 and house.gov

  • From: William Allen Simpson
  • Date: Thu Oct 02 06:18:40 2008
Suresh Ramasubramanian wrote:
On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 2:17 PM, chris neill <[email protected]> wrote: 
Give me a break. You're telling me the White House's mail servers are even
on the same network as their web servers? What, is this 1997?


Well, I do know that there's two ways you can contact your congressman -

* Feedback forms on individual websites
* Email

Chris:

The "House" is the House of Representatives; see also the "Senate", the
other branch of Congress.

The "White House" is the place the President of the Executive branch lives.
One of its wings has executive offices in it....

As it is obvious, the various servers are not on the same network, as they
are controlled by different branches (that don't trust each other).

Suresh:

AFAICT, the www.house.gov stuff is Akamaized.

At least in the days I was hanging around there, all the email was sent
via a centralized system for the House.  Even the web forms were actually
sent via that system.

Some years ago, I caused considerable consternation bypassing that system
with a VPN for my Member, as the system was controlled by Republicans, and
it was apparent that they were snooping on the Democrats.

I don't know how it's setup these days.  Democrats have only been in
control since early 2007, and it has changed considerably.  I'll note that
the house.gov SOA still lists mail.house.gov, but there's no A record.

The clerk and primary DNS systems seem to be 143.231.x.x/16, with diverse
paths.  The secondary NS is on 143.228.x.x/16, so it seems to be
reasonably well done.