When news isn’t news

June 24, 2004 · Comments

This morning, I logged into MT 3.0 on my site and saw this:

weird login

Instead of pulling the normal “MovableType News” headlines on the right hand side of the screen, I was getting the contents of a different page inside my MT news area.

When someone doesn’t know what’s going on and something freaky happens on their computer, the first thing they think of is that they have a virus. True to form, my initial concern was that I had discovered some new form of comment spam that missed the comment section and landed on my mt.cgi page instead.

I looked in my test MT install on a sub domain, as well as another site that has MT 3.0D and they looked fine. It appeared to be limited to my site.

I “posted to the MovableType Support forum”:http://www.movabletype.org/support/index.php?s=3889b5230f636536abd2c49029cdce5e&act=ST&f=8&t=42391&st=0&#entry188167 and then remembered that I had a paid-for personal license and could ask for one-on-one support. So I opened a ticket.

In the meantime, I dug into the MT files, trying to figure out where the problem was. Redoing the mt.cfg file didn’t help. Nor did reinstalling most of the support files.In my @tmpl/cms/ folder was a file named list_blog.tmpl and the relevant code there is:

bq.
<div class="news-box">
<h4><a href="http://www.movabletype.org/?v=<TMPL_VAR NAME=MT_VERSION>"><MT_TRANS phrase="Movable Type News"></a></h4>
<div class="inner">
<TMPL_VAR NAME=NEWS_HTML>
<p><MT_TRANS phrase="More news about "><a href="http://www.movabletype.org/?v=<TMPL_VAR NAME=MT_VERSION>">Movable Type</a>.</p>
</div>

In particular, the line <TMPL_VAR NAME=NEWS_HTML> was calling “http://digimedia.com/”:http://digimedia.com/ instead of the “Movable Type News”:http://www.movabletype.org/news/newsbox.html page it was supposed to.

Over the past few hours I’ve been dealing with a chicken vs. the egg thing between MovableType support and “ICDSoft”:http://www.icdsoft.com my hosting provider.

MovableType support says:

bq.. The site included in the box is digimedia.com:

http://www.digimedia.com/

who own org.com and com.org:

http://www.movabletype.org.com/
http://www.movabletype.com.org/

so it may have been a temporary DNS kaboom, which is now fixed.
Because MT caches the result, www.momathome.com isn’t refetching the newsbox until it thinks it needs to, but test.momathome.com was able to fetch it fine when it tried.

This DSLreports post tells why IE users see org.com and com.org a relative lot:

http://www.dslreports.com/shownews/39395

but I’m not sure why an actual DNS server would automatically add .com to an unresolving .org, nor why this user would get digimedia.com when the root domains are different and simply adding .com yields a 404:

http://www.movabletype.org.com/news/newsbox.html

p. However, ICDSoft doesn’t believe it was a DNS issue, rather they believe it’s a bug/vulnerability in MovableType that caused an errant entry in my mt_session table.

It’s fixed now, but very strange. It’s a nice feature that MT 3.0 “calls home” for the latest updates but maybe this shows a possible downside and how that information could possibly be manipulated? We’ll see.

Regardless, a big thumbs up to MovableType’s new ticket/technical support system. They answered me within a few hours and kept at it, never jumping to the obvious “it must be your fault” conclusion that support folks often start out with.

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