The PhoneBoy Blog

I had went into my Wordpress Admin today to write posts as usual, but it was slower than molasses in winter. After some troubleshooting–was thankful 1&1 had strace installed on the box and my web pages are served by a process I could attach it to–I tracked it down to something (C)Feed was doing–a plugin I had recently installed in order to add a Creative Commons notice to my RSS feed items.  Specifically, it was trying to access Feedster.

I had never heard of Feedster before, but it looks like they’re in the deadpool. It’s weird because the reverse DNS for the IP feedster.com resolves to is an AT&T DSL IP address:

guysmiley:~ dwelch$ nslookup www.feedster.com
Server:         10.3.2.1
Address:        10.3.2.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:
www.feedster.com        canonical name = feedster.com.
Name:   feedster.com
Address: 64.165.112.194

guysmiley:~ dwelch$ nslookup 64.165.112.194
Server:         10.3.2.1
Address:        10.3.2.1#53

Non-authoritative answer:
194.112.165.64.in-addr.arpa     name = adsl-64-165-112-194.dsl.snfc21.pacbell.net.

Authoritative answers can be found from:

guysmiley:~ dwelch$

Oh well, mystery solved. I’ve hacked my copy of (C)Feed to not check Feedster anymore. Maybe the author can update the plugin?