the absence or misbehaviour of certain services while we moved things around.
The announcement did state "efn hosted services like email" would be down
but did not explicitly describe what would happen.
The main task for yesterday was moving all the remaining service hosts out
our charnelton place machine room. The unfortunate thing is that most of the hosts we moved yesterday are attached to each other via an NFS crossmount hairball [1]
Given the nature of the message reported, I can locate Horst's visit temporally,
after the webserver had been brought up and DNS had propagated, but before
the fileserver had been adjusted to it's new environment (which involved telling the SUN
boxes that they had new addresses, a remarkably involved process).
Personally, I think the Haiku error pages are annoying and unprofessional, they've been there for long enough that they have the weight of tradition, but they are going away
once the various aspects of web service migrate to their new homes.
I had hoped that we [2] would manage to get the various services of the NFS crossmount
untangled and deaggregated, so they could be dealt with rationally and sanely. This effort is still in progress. But Hofstatder's law[3] seems to hold more than usual.
[1] the NFS hairball was perhaps a good idea at one time, it meant that people had
a single login to access all of the services, and a single place to access their files.
Unfortunately it's an architecture that does not cope well with sudden unexpected demands (like spam runs, or slashdotting) Managing a system where almost everything depends on everything else can lead to superstitious approaches to system administration; which is a bad thing. (not uncommon, but still bad)
[2] the efn technical staff managed by Michael Jackson ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
[3] It will take longer than you think, even when taking Hofstatder's law[3] into account.
On Monday, January 26, 2004, at 08:57 AM, Ralph Zeller wrote:
http://www.bayliner.com/i think http://www.webfoot.com/advice/email.top.html would be a more effective reference.
On 01/26/04 03am, horst wrote:--Sorry to bug this list, but this situation is quiet damaging to us(*),
and I know there are folks on this list who can fix the problem in no
time. (*)us being [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Cascade Canoe Club).
We have sent out invitations to a couple hundred people for an upcoming
event with references to our webpage hosted at EFN.
But what they see instead is :
"""
You step in the stream,
but the water has moved on.
This page is not here.
"""
INSTEAD IT SHOULD MENTION THAT THERE IS A TECHNICAL SERVER PROBLEM, then
people would come back, but now our organiztion looks pretty silly
instead.
Everybody understands that server problems and maintenance are unavoidable but the original warning (**) did not mention web outage:
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Date: Wed, 21 Jan 2004 23:51:13 -0800 (PST) Planned Maintenance While EFN Moves Equipment
On Sunday, January 25th, EFN system administrators will be moving
some of our equipment out of our old machine room. Work will start
about 06:00 and will continue until we have the moved equipment up
and running at its new location. We hope to have things running by
noon. During the outage EFN hosted services like email will not be
available; dialup Internet service and DSL should continue to be
available.
Due to the changes in our service infrastructure this move will require,
EFN dialup shell service will be unavailable for some time after
the move is completed. While it is our intention to restore
dialup shell when we can, we will not have the capability to deliver
it, and we do not know when we will be able to do it again.
We apologize for any inconvenience, and we thank you for
supporting community networking!
--
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
- Horst_______________________________________________ EuG-LUG mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://mailman.efn.org/cgi-bin/listinfo/eug-lug
Metaphors for system administration -----------------------------------------------
bailing the titanic with paper cups: or polishing the deck chairs thereof
steering an iceberg with a broom: nonexciting challenges await you
capturing runaway bulldozers: once is chance, twice coincidence, ...
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