Slashdot Mirror
Slashdot Back Online
I'm still not exactly clued in as to why we're back online, but hey, we are. Sometime saturday morning our Cisco router melted down. Ordinarily this would only be the end of the world, but none of our qualified personel were available to fix it, thus triggering the end of several nearby worlds as well. Props to Yazz, KurtG and Scott from Cisco for managing to help get us back online. We'll post more when we know it.
Jeff and Rob are not easy to work with. Best wishes to my replacement.
- Anne Tomlinson
I've never heard of you anne, but thats a pretty impressive troll. No doubt I'm hard to work w/. I'm a perfectionist. But neither of those phrases sounds like Jeff or I. We'd be much less polite.
Pants are still optional, but recommended for you.
nothing is funnier when user friendly does it.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Hemos decided to test Exodus' claim that the colocation cages were sharkproof. He had them lower the cage with him inside.
Poor bastard...
Join the Great Fujisan Expedition!
-- My Weblog.
I remember how stressed out my cat, Kyoto, was when she became Cisco Certified.
:) "she" knows a little too much about PostgreSQL vs. MySQL.
:).
:)
Well, for all of you wondering whether or not this is the real Sarcasta, as in Rob "Cmdr Dorko...err..Taco" Malda's other half, Kathleen Fent...here is your answer right here, plain as day.
If you check out this pageyou'll quickly see that Aunt Kathy here doesn't have a cat named Kyoto .
Combine this with the fact that for a Mac using graphic designer (and I know many
Add to that the high user number (c'mon, if this was Taco's chick, she'd be like a high user number, right?
No way. Taco: If this user is really your chick, tell us.
And to the holder of this Sarcasta account: Do try to do a little research before you troll as Sarcasta, 'k?
My journal has hot
You're right, the Slashdot guys screwed up .. I want my money back, right now, you cheap Slashdot motherfuckers. How dare you run a free website without online fail-over routers? I'm goin' down to the Salvation Army and getting some free lunch and when I get back I want to see TWO rows of blinky lights in that rack, or I want a refund on my subscription, pronto.
You are talking out of your rear.
:-)
We use Exodus, and they provide us with two separate ethernet feeds, down separate cable runs, from two separate routers in different parts of the internal NOC. No need for any routers at all; we have separate endpoint hardware on each feed and just do a rough load balance across the feeds with round robin DNS.
The recommended (by Exodus) alternative is to have a pair of peered routers which actively load balance across the feeds at the IP level, and back up each other if one goes down. I didn't do this as we're a startup I didn't want to pay for an extra pair of routers.
Either of the above will ensure that there is no single point of failure on the front end. This is referred to as a dual-homed configuration. Exodus' WAN will ensure there is no SPF further out; making your own equipment cluster and software fault tolerant is your problem
It sounds like Slashdot is running with a single-homed connection, and that the router which failed is their own kit in their own rack. $$ permitting, they could have either (a) done a proper dual-homed setup, as per one of the above, or (b) had a spare router sitting in the rack and lease Exodus' managed hardware monitoring service, which would have meant Exodus techs switching it out when it failed.
I don't know what Slashdot's budget for hosting is, but we are a much smaller company than Andover and dual-homed service is not exactly killing our budget. I would conservatively assume that bandwidth is Slashdot's biggest expense.
You cannot throw pies at the co-lo provider for your own failure to have a robust setup and make proper use of the facilities they offer.
Kuro5hin is only loosely associated with OSDN. Yeah, we run their ads and get revenue that way, and we are listed in some of their material (but not all, and not often). We're not owned (even in part) by VA, and I don't know of any plans to 'buy' us (which makes sense, since they don't have to cover any costs).
:)).
I do all system administration -- DNS, mail, etc., whereas the VA owned sites all share the same pool of cool admins (like Yaz, Alliecat, etc).
Rusty and I are happy with our current colocation service (vhosting). We've never, ever had problems of connectivity (only of perl/admin error
--
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Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
And when our qualified personel arrived, we discovered that she wasn't actuually as qualified as we had hoped. Then she quit
I see you are checking your employees references just as much as you are checking the submission hyperlinks.....
Sorry, I had to take that stab. :)
Feed the need: Digitaladdiction.net
the original statement was a little bit different:
I'm still not exactly clued in as to why we're back online, but hey, we are. Sometime saturday morning our Cisco router melted down. Ordinarily this would only be the end of the world, but none of our qualified personel were available to fix it, thus triggering the end of several nearby worlds as well. And when our qualified personel arrived, we discovered that she wasn't actuually as qualified as we had hoped. Then she quit, thus terminating 3 local star systems. Hemos or I will update this story as soon as we know what the hell happened. But apparently creds go to Kurt Grey and Cisco tech support. Hopefully we'll have more info soon.
Q:Mommy, How can I become a good karma whore.
/., the champions of open source, aren't using a Linux box with a few NICs and some hacked-together code as a load balancer?
A: Steal posts from kuro5hin.
I wonder why
Exhibit A
Funny that when Microsoft's router failed (probably a Cisco also) it was catastrophic incompetence but for you guy's it's just bad luck.
Exhibit B
--
All the versions I've seen personally in chronological order:
The one from another comment:
Version 1: I'm still not exactly clued in as to why we're back online, but hey, we are. Sometime saturday morning our Cisco router melted down. Ordinarily this would only be the end of the world, but none of our qualified personel were available to fix it. Hemos or I will update this story as soon as we know what the hell happened.
Version 2: Inject some stuff about the qualified person being a she, and not being very qualified, and quitting.
Version 3: Inject some weird stuff about neighboring starsystems also being blown up.
Am I losing my mind?
I wonder why /., the champions of open source, aren't using a Linux box with a few NICs and some hacked-together code as a load balancer?
Your qualified personell would be just as qualified as the woman who quit, and it would have cost less. Plus, you could appeal to the masses with an Ask Slashdot about the best way to set it up!
Funny that when Microsoft's router failed (probably a Cisco also) it was catastrophic incompetence but for you guy's it's just bad luck.
I don't know whether the stories of Rob and Jeff flaming the tech for not being able to her job are true but the fact remains that:
Makes me wonder where editorial control heading.
Australian? Join EFA
More from Roblimo over at NewsForge Sunday June 24, @07:30PM
- by Robin "Roblimo" Miller - On Saturday, June 23, the primary controller in the router that controls access to all OSDN servers hosted at the Exodus facility in Waltham, MA, suffered a catastrophic failure. The sites affected were Slashdot, freshmeat, NewsForge, and Mediabuilder, among others. The secondary controller did not automatically take over as it shoud have. It did not work when activated manually, either. The first Cisco support people contacted professed to be "amazed" at the situation, saying it was the first time they had seen a failure of this kind. OSDN and Cisco people, working through Saturday night, were unable to cure the problem. Sunday afternoon, OSDN employee Kurt Gray and Cisco rep Scott, working by telephone, were stepping through the router's configuration and, says Kurt, as they worked to undo other changes that had been made, "on one reset everything came back." OSDN network operations were already in the process of rebuilding the company's network to eliminate the router as a potential single point of failure. As of 7 p.m. US EDT most of the sites were available at least part of the time, but full service was not yet restored. There may still be slowdowns or intermttent failures until a permanent fix is made. We'll have a more complete story within a few days. Right now, OSDN network operations staff members are too busy working to talk.
IIRC, they are using a Linux box for their load ballancer. It was their router that got fried, which is a completely different beast. Heavy duty routers remain specialized boxes, and Linux hasn't really serious inroads into that market yet.
Not funny at all when you get the facts straight. The serious problems that MS had were with their DNS servers- which were running Windows- not their routers. IIRC the DNS servers were later cracked, too, which was rightly seen as an indication of poor security. When Microsoft uses its own products, they don't stand up to the use they're being put to, and then Microsoft has to use *BSD based systems to get working again, that's very different from when a Linux site has its non-Linux hardware melt down (and the description did make it sound like a hardware, not software, problem).
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
Everything else on /. is redundant--the stories, comments, lame jokes--so why don't we have redundant hardware too?
Me : Dude it's like Yahoo, it's never down.
ISP : Sa-lash dot?
Me : Dude slashdot.org!
ISP : www.
Me : No no no... listen 64.28.67.150
ISP : Uh... www
Me : Damnit I'm down can't you see I'm down?
ISP : We're like up and stuff. Is this a Macintosh?
Me : I am calling my lawyer! I'll sue you blind!
ISP : Uh I have to get my supervisor.
Me : -click-
---
This
Can you give us any info on why she quit? From the short blurb, I can only think that she came in, didn't know exactly what to do, got chewed out, then ran out of the place crying. Hopefully I am wrong. This would make a great ask slashdot "how much leeway do you give a tech employee." I know when I started, I could do anything given enough time, but my employeer stuck with me. Granted in this case, there wasn't any time to waste.
http://www.windmeadow.com/
As a perfectionist, you'll of course want to know that you use "me" when the reference comes after the verb. "Neither of those phrases sounds like Jeff or me".
Also, given that you're a perfectionist, you'll be appalled to hear that someone has been using the "CmdrTaco" identity to post poorly spelled, ungrammatical crap all over Slashdot for the last three years. That same person has always tried to justify himself by whining that he "doesn't care about that stuff" and "doesn't want to be too fussy". This may or may not be the person who wrote the notoriously buggy first release of Slash, and said that it was "close enough".
But of course that couldn't be you
Because you're a perfectionist.
Ha, ha, ha. I think I'm going to have to give up satire.
-- the most controversial site on the Web
You: I can't reach my favorate site:
ISP: Ok, can you reach other sites?
You: Yes, but I can't reach this one. It must be your fault.
ISP: Well, what site are you trying to reach?
You: Slashdot. It's never down. It always works
ISP: I can't seem to reach it from here either. My guess is it's down.
You: No, it's your fault. I want to see my slashdot.
ISP: Let me do some tests. No, I'm sorry, that sight is down.
You: You are lying to me!! Just like AOL did. Your ISP sucks! I want a refund.
ISP: Well, you can reach every other site, right?
You: Yes.
ISP: Then most likely, the problem is with the website.
You: *explitive deleted* I want you supervisor.
ISP: Fine.
The Internet is generally stupid
if that was a post about a guy, and he was thought to be less than qualified, would you be posting this?
sexism goes both ways, assuming someone isn't incompetent due to their gender is just as stupid as assuming they are
equal rights for incompetent people dammit! *L*
and yes, I am a chick
on a personal note, maybe that post was taken down due to it's rudeness, rather than the sex of the person involved...
my 2 cents...
-Karl /dos]# file msdos.sys
---------
[root@kgutwin
[root@kgutwin
msdos.sys: fsav (linux) virus (17518-87)
When I couldn't get my Slashdot, I assumed the worse. High-profile hijacking. Aliens beaming up the OSDN headquarters. Servers sneakily migrated to Windows, which then promptly crashed.
Kidding aside, I'm glad Slashdot is back up.
When I stepped outside it looked like everything was being generated by 500,000,000 GeForce3s!!! The trees looked REAL!! It must have been at least 1,600,000,000 x 1,240,000,000!!! I couln't even see any jaggies! Talk about anti-ailiasing!!
After spending 2 days outside sue to lack of Slashdot it's hard to come back to my Power Mac 6100/60 with a 14" monitor at 640x480. I wish I had reality's 3D card...
And it seem's Slashdot has slashdotted itself. How did that happen??
--Volrath50
I mean who is this CmdrTaco guy and how the heck did he get UID #1???
It's obvious that this isn't the real Rob Malda, we all know that Slashdot editors NEVER post at Slashdot....
--Volrath50
Sometime saturday morning our Cisco router melted down. We were making smores, using the excess heat generated by the improperly ventilated Cisco router, Saturday morning after finishing a 16 hour coding spree when all of a sudden CmdrTaco dropped his. The ohhh so gooey marshmello and yummy chocolate dripped into the air vents and all of a sudden the Cisco smoked and all the led's went out. Realizing there must be a fault, we promptly panacked and ran around the room screeming. but none of our qualified personel were available to fix it Our Cisco expert wasn't up to the task due to eating too many smores on a earlier coding break. Upon realizing this, we attempted to fix it ourselves by plugging it back in, but to no avail. We then called Cisco. Props to Yazz, KurtG and Scott from Cisco for managing to help get us back online. Those great guys from Cisco, upon hearing of our predicament, instructed us to apply a half sinewave duration, several hundered newton, force laterally on the Cisco box using our lower right appenditure. Upon asking them "What the fuck are you talking about?" they replied "Kick the damn thing." Using extreme precision, we followed out their instructions and kicked the shit out of the box. Amazingly the thing reset itself and began working as usual. We suspect that the cause was a software bug, or a chocolate induced short circuit.
**AA: a bunch of mindless jerks who'll be the first against the wall when the revolution comes
Gathering data from your May 2nd demographic evauation, Im thinking that you nearly lost five percent of your readers in the space of forty five minutes.
Yours in disappointment,
Australianus Geekus