Twit's having problems - erm, twitter

Main Menu

My Certifications

BB Training
Certified Ethical Hacker

Written by Jason Kendall

Thursday, 05 June 2008 23:29

Qualifications

- M.S. Computer Science or related field preferred
- Extensive experience building large-scale server applications
- Expert knowledge developing and debugging in Java and C/C++ on Unix
- Knowledge of python and ruby
- Experience with distributed systems, operating system internals, filesystems, compilers, threading models, and server architectures
- Disciplined approach to testing and quality assurance
- Great written communication and documentation abilities

The bolded jumps right out at me. Sheesh! No wonder their having problems. Maybe I should dig into their infrastructure ~~a little more some day~~.

Quick scan via netcraft shows us their using Linux/Apache - good call. Still need more details.

wget can let me see the host responses with -S:

jason@homer:/# wget -S www.twitter.com
--21:47:55-- http://www.twitter.com/
=> `index.html'
Resolving www.twitter.com... 128.121.146.100
Connecting to www.twitter.com|128.121.146.100|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently
Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2008 01:48:20 GMT
Server: Apache
Location: http://twitter.com/
Cache-Control: max-age=300
Expires: Sat, 07 Jun 2008 01:53:20 GMT
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Content-Length: 227
Connection: close
Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1
Location: http://twitter.com/ [following]
--21:47:56-- http://twitter.com/
=> `index.html'
Resolving twitter.com... 128.121.146.100
Connecting to twitter.com|128.121.146.100|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Date: Sat, 07 Jun 2008 01:48:22 GMT
Server: hi
Status: 200 OK
P3P: CP="NOI DSP COR NID ADMa OPTa OUR NOR"
X-Runtime: 0.01355
ETag: "0b7227441bc85f068424c5ba65b9eb54"
Cache-Control: private, max-age=0, must-revalidate, max-age=300
Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8
Content-Length: 7302
Via: 1.0 twitter-web044.twitter.com
Expires: Sat, 07 Jun 2008 01:53:22 GMT
Vary: Accept-Encoding
Connection: close
Length: 7,302 (7.1K) [text/html]

Going to www.twitter.com/ yeilded a 301 Moved to /index.html (good, did this right). But whats interesting is, they have clobbered apache (baddly) to report a different server type. The 301 shows "apache", but the following 200 for the index.html shows "hi".

Also, jugging from the "Via" line, we have a load ballancer before the web servers - I assumed as much, but lets dig [Pun Entended] into the dns.