I'd add that not only does it sound like GPO maintained no failover
backup, it sounds, based on Jonathan Lebreton's report, like they
didn't even maintain an offline backup, since they're needing to
regenerate the purl database from raw data, rather than simply restoring
from a backup, which would generally be much quicker then the process
that Jonathan Lebreton seems to be describing.
From what info we have, it sounds like GPO simply, well, was very very
far from 'best practices' for a service meant to be robustly reliable.
On the other hand, we're just going from sort of third hand hearsay,
maybe they were doing things more right than it sounds, but some kind of
catastrophic unexpected 'perfect storm' still happened to bring
everything down. Maybe 48 hours of outage in 10 years (how long has GPO
purl been running? Have there been outages like this before?) is
appropriate reliability for the level of importance of this service. I
dunno.
Jonathan
Jonathan Lebreton wrote:
This is indeed an interesting problem - we are all dependent on a
centralized service node.
Just got off the phone with GPO 9 am 9/1/09.
I was told they are now up to 50% or PURLs restored but the script is
running very slowly line-by-line since the server (they're updating the
production server while it is up) is experiencing unusually heavy load
from the user community and bots scheduled to troll at beginning of the
month.
Jonathan LeBreton
Sr. Associate University Librarian
Temple University Libraries
voice: 215-204-8231
fax: 215-204-5201
email: lebre...@temple.edu
email: jonat...@temple.edu
-----Original Message-----
From: Code for Libraries [mailto:code4...@listserv.nd.edu] On Behalf
Of
James Jacobs
Sent: Monday, August 31, 2009 6:06 PM
To: CODE4LIB@LISTSERV.ND.EDU
Subject: Re: [CODE4LIB] GPO PURLs
Hi all, (cross-posted to purl-dev)
I'm a documents librarian (and member of the Depository Library
Council)
and usually just a lurker over here. Thanks Keith and Patricia for the
easy workaround. I shared this with govdoc-l and on my blog:
http://freegovinfo.info/node/2704
See especially the comment that as of today, only 3,677 PURLs out of
116,237 have been restored (3.1%). I would love to hear your
thoughts/ideas for how this kind of critical system failure can be
averted in the future from a technological standpoint. Is it possible
to
mirror a purl server? Will the same issue occur when GPO moves to
handles in FDsys (http://www.handle.net/)? Will a distributed
infrastructure as I've briefly mapped out be able to handle these
types
of critical system crashes better?
Please let me know and I'd be happy to share your ideas with GPO and
the
documents community.
Best,
James Jacobs
Keith Jenkins wrote:
Thanks to everyone who helped me confirm that the GPO PURL server is
down. An official announcement on the GPO Listserv said:
"The PURL Server is currently inaccessible. GPO is working with
IT
staff to restore service as soon as possible. We regret any
inconvenience caused by the server problems. An updated listserv
will
be sent once service is restored."
While the server is down, here is one workaround (thanks to Patricia
Duplantis):
1. Go to http://catalog.gpo.gov/
2. Click "Advanced Search"
3. Search for word in "URL/PURL", enter the PURL
4. Click "Go"
5. The original URL at the time of cataloging should appear in a
53x note.
This incident, however, illuminates a weakness in PURL systems:
access
is broken when the PURL server breaks, even though the documents are
still online at their original URLs.
Maybe someone more familiar with PURL systems can tell me... is
there
any way to harvest data from a PURL server, so that a backup/mirror
can be available?
Keith
--
James R. Jacobs
International Documents Librarian
Green Library, Stanford University
P: (650) 725-1030 E: jrjac...@stanford.edu
AIM: LibrarianJames T: @freegovinfo
The more beautiful questions demand the more beautiful answers,
and if we can learn to ask them, we stand a chance of steering
clear of shipwreck on our jury-rigged and not so distant star.
--Lewis Lapham, Lapham's Quarterly I(3), Summer, 2008, p.17.
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