Published: April 04, 2006 11:51 pm      

City manager misunderstanding prompts international response

TUTTLE — The City of Tuttle gained worldwide attention this week after a series of e-mails between city manager Jerry A. Taylor and a software developer.

The story started last week, when Taylor logged on the city’s web site, www.tuttle-ok.gov, and saw a screen he’d never seen before. The page had a header reading “Cent-OS 3 Test Page,” followed by the statement that the server was installed and working properly. After that was printed the information a website administrator would need to get their website up and running.

So Taylor checked with his web host, a company called GovOffice, and they told him they did not use CentOS. He checked with Vidia Communications, the city’s former web host, and was told that they didn’t even know what Cent-OS was.

With 22 years of computer experience, Taylor knew what the unknown can do to computers. When he learned that no one at city hall had put the software on the computers, and no one at GovOffice or Vidia claimed to have, he assumed that a hacker had somehow gotten into the city’s website and changed the page, possibly placing harmful computer viruses on the site.

Fearing the worst, Taylor looked over the web page again and found a link to the CentOS website, where he found the e-mail address for developer Johnny Hughes. He began to compose an e-mail.

“Who gave you permission to invade my website and block me and anyone else from accessing it???” Taylor wrote in his first e-mail to Hughes. “Please remove your software immediately before I report it to government officials!! I am the City Manager of Tuttle, Oklahoma.”

Hughes is a developer of CentOS, which stands for the Community ENTerprise Operating System. Just like computers need an operating system to function, like MacOS or Windows, web sites do too, and CentOS is one of those - distributed through the computer platform of Linux. CentOS is free to download and use, and is developed by a small team of volunteers. According to their website, centos.org, CentOS exists to provide a free enterprise class computing platform to anyone who wishes to use it.

But Taylor didn’t want to use it. He wanted to see the city’s website.

Johnny Hughes’ opening greeting to Taylor, “I feel sorry for your city,” was followed with more helpful information. “CentOS is an operating system. It is probably installed on the computer that runs your website. We hope you are happy with it, since we produced it for free and you are able to use it without paying us ... and are even threatening to have us arrested for providing to you free of charge. Please contact someone who does IT for you and show them the page so that they can configure your apache webserver correctly.”

Taylor’s reply, “Get this website off my home page!!!!! It is blocking access to my website!!!!~!” brought more information from Hughes, who wrote to Taylor that he would be happy to help Taylor configure Tuttle’s webserver, but needed some further information.

Taylor wrote back with a second notice to get the software off, then threatened to file a complaint with the FBI if the software was not removed.

After the e-mails went back in forth in this fashion, Hughes decided to check out the city’s website, and found that the hosting company listed for cityoftuttle.org, the city’s former web address, was hosted by Vidia Communications. Furthermore, Vidia was using the free software CentOS.

Taylor contacted Vidia again, who told him that they had recently suffered a computer crash, and during the rebuild, they reinstalled the software that affected the city’s website.

“I am sorry that we had to go through the process and accusations to get the problem resolved,” Taylor wrote in his final e-mail to Hughes. “It could have been resolved a lot quicker if the initial correspondence with you provided the helpful information that was transmitted in the last messages.”

Hughes apparently felt that the apology wasn’t enough to make up for the accusations and FBI threats for a problem he didn’t cause and really had no obligation to fix, and he posted the entire e-mail exchange on the CentOS website on Friday. That day, the first e-mails started coming in to the Tuttle Times, to Mayor Lonnie Paxton, and to Taylor. As more and more people read the exchange, the more people grew interested.

On Monday, a check at the popular search engine google.com showed 387 matches for Tuttle and CentOS. By Wednesday morning, there were more than 26,000. Phone calls from across the country started coming in to the newspaper and city offices, and e-mails from Switzerland, Australia, Wales and England were received. Many of the web sites discussing the exchange are in foreign languages.

Information about the e-mail conversation was added to Tuttle’s entry on Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia, and shortly thereafter, an entry for Taylor himself was created. Searches on his name and CentOS, or of Tuttle, bring up thousands of online journals and blogs where individuals say exactly what they think of Taylor, and Tuttle.

In their search to find out more, web surfers discovered that the Tuttle Times online forums were hacked, and theorized that it was in retribution for the e-mails. Those forums, however, were corrupted several months ago, and the newspaper’s now former web hosts did not repair it after numerous requests. New forums should be available at the Times site in the coming weeks.

Mayor Paxton said that he received around 300 e-mails because of the misunderstanding, and Jerry Taylor eventually removed his own e-mail link from the web site to stop the continual flow of correspondence from people around the world.

Taylor said that he didn’t understand why so many people were concerned about an e-mail exchange between two people.

“This is just a bunch of freaks out there that don’t have anything better to do,” he said. “When I came in to work Monday morning, I had about 500 e-mails, plus anonymous phone calls from all the geeks out there. [CentOS is] a free operating system that this guy gives away, which tells you how much time he’s got on his hands.”

Taylor said that the mistake could have happened to anyone, and he stands by what he did.

“I’m not about to follow any instructions on an unknown web page,” Taylor said. “That could put a virus on my system.”

Mayor Paxton said that the city manager knows a lot more about computers than he does, and he trusts Taylor

“The city manager was doing everything he could to protect the website,” Paxton said. “There was no profanity used, nothing vulgar used, just Jerry [Taylor] trying to find out what was going on. He was being aggressive and finding out what happened to the website.”

“I was just frustrated,” he said. “I’ve got a strange website coming up, and I don’t know who caused it.” Taylor said that he also did not regret threatening Hughes with FBI action, since he believes that was what prompted Hughes to start treating him seriously.

“After that, he called me Mr. Taylor,” he said, “And he got me the information I needed.”

Paxton said that even though this was garnering worldwide attention, the council had other things to deal with.

“He was not being that rude. He was protecting the city’s website,” Paxton continued. “You know, we have issues of water, we have issues with sewer, we have issues with roads. People here want better park facilities. They want a library. This Internet exchange doesn’t even make my top 10 list. As a city, we’re not going to spend a lot of time worrying about this.”

A link to the entire exchange, plus other worldwide sites of interest relating to the story, is on our website at www.tuttletimes.com.