Slashdot Mirror
MS, CNET On 7-Day Messenger Outage
imipak writes: "Microsoft have
finally commented on the recent seven day outage
at their
Messenger IM service -- some users have permanently
lost data, and there's still no explanation of the cause.
Interesting earlier story from CNet News. Key quote:
"... an outage that lasts seven days with no valid
explanation really starts to make you think about
.Net, and about Microsoft's plans for the Internet.
What if this were the new Office software
verification service that was down?"" Here 's a story on MSNBC as well.
Um, you're wrong on this point.... there are a *huge* number of companies using win95/nt4 networks for the past ~3-4 years with no plans whatsoever to upgrade within the next 3-4 years. They will only use windows 2000 if they are forced to do so with some strong-arm tactic. (Random liscence checks?) Otherwise they will just install win95/nt4 on the replacement machine whenever a current machine goes down.
Also, many companies are using office95, not office97 or xp, and have no plans on upgrading in the near future.
You, sir are a mormon. I mean moron.
The point you miss is that there is *always* a mass exodus from AOL going on. A good portion of the userbase does view it as "training wheels" and moves on to other or better Internet access.
That's why they are so aggressive in mailbombing CDs -- they need a constant supply of new users to replace those who have left. There may well have been a large number of users who dumped AOL because of the outages, but when the online userbase was growing at 100% per year, how would you even notice?
I think this is less true today than it was a few years ago during the outages. AOL has been very aggressive rolling out new clients, one reason is to keep their retention rate up. They also run TV ads targetted at their existing user base (rather than potential new users) which basically say "AOL is great, it's like one big happy family! (Please don't quit!)"
b) Slasdot is not trying to position their web-board as a place for you to do business. Microsoft is trying to position Messenger for that. Your comparison is weak.
You can now bring MSN Messenger "in house" (like Sametime) with the latest version of Exchange.
Probably a smart thing to do if you are using it as a work tool, for all the same reasons you run e-mail inhouse (security, control of data and information, monitoring, and independance).
Don't worry about it. .NET will answer all your questions when they roll it out. Really though, I do get pissed off at companies touting products and then giving no explanation as to what they really are. For the longest time I thought Clariton was some female product to use during their period. Who would've though it was for allergies! Their commercials didn't say ANYTHING about allergies. Why can't people market things without fluffing it up into absolutely meaningless nonsense?
As for sending quick messages to co-workers, does your company not have an internal phone system?
I'm reminded of this strip...
Like, what good is this? If he's the laziest, that must make you the uber-laziest for not trying it yourself.
Yahoo also stores the "friends" list server side.
Yahoo chat IDs are tied into your yahoo account as well so it uses the same password you use for the suite of yahoo services. I never get spam on yahoo clients, thats a definite feature. The default message recieved sound effect though is absolutely atrocious.
--- I do not moderate.
Plus, if, heaven's forbid, it's actually MS' fault, they will not admit it. They never do.
That is one of my problems with MS in general...they believe that they have to spin the truth without exception. This is one of the things that makes a huge segment of the technology industry mistrust them. If they lie about one thing, it's hard to think they're not lying about another.
Of course, one of my other problems with MS is that their software tends to be inferior for my particular needs, but that's another issue altogether.
-db
From what I've read, they had a disk controller failure, and the secondary (ie. backup) controller also had some kind of fault which lead them "further down the disaster recovery plan." Which means now they go to tape backups, probably.
If they don't have tape backups, then they should be flayed, soaked in rubbing alcohol, and dumped in a big pile of dung.
Sounds to me like they didn't really have a good architecture in the first place. If they were relying on a single machine, and assuming that internal redundancy would cut it, they were very short sighted. Were I tasked with such a systems architecture, there would be a completely redundant layer of complete systems which would periodically (ie. every five hours or so) get complete copies of all the live data.
Were such a catastrophe to occur, dump the production systems, and go to your offline backups.
Downsides of such a plan: a) double the cost, and b) depending on the size of your data set, doing all that copying could prove problematic. Then again, I'd do in with a farm of these running linux, with a gigantic pair of hot-swap Oracle databases running on the backend.
But that's just me. :)
-db
PS. usual disclaimer applies...I'm hocking my own company's product in that link above, but I don't care. It's cool. I like it, and I use it!! And, I'm not in sales...so there! ;)
I'm Spartacus.
Man, I love conspiracy theories.
...
--
I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations
And I'd be a Libertarian, if they weren't all a bunch of tax-dodging professional whiners.
Berke Breathed
Whats worse than the folks who couldn't yack to their buddies for hours on end is people PAYING for MSN. My grandparent's had a hell of a time figuring out what was happening when MSN Messenger told them they weren't connected to the internet. I spent a while with them on the phone about that one. MSN needed to show off Passport to everyone so their execs basically forced them to incorporate it into their services. Before the dot com downturn I'm assuming MSN expected to be selling a bunch of their Companion boxes with their internet service. Then I could go to Jonny MSNSubscriber's house and cruise the net with all my personal settings. This is a decent idea but has run into some technical difficulties. I agree with those now question .NET (but for fucksake MS doesn't need to host .NET components you goddamn idiots they're just providing the foundation classes and runtimes) and its reliability. This just teaches the lesson to be prepared and don't put all your eggs in one basket and if you do only have one basket make sure it's a BaskeTron 4000 that can survive an orbital reentry.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.
Don't people pay for MSN?
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
So we each get a local copy of Passport, then? I don't see how that will work. Some part of .NET has to be an internet service for the centralized Microsoft authentication to work.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
That was sort of the joke, but oh well.
Your right to not believe: Americans United for Separation of Church and
I would think that for performance and reliability reasons, a system like this would be using a Xiotech or EMC fiber-channel storage system that was hot-mirrored to another storage system somewhere else in the country, preferrably to another data center in another part of the world connected to another part of the Internet.
I find the only useful purpose for Windows is gaming and some multimedia things (but this is shrinking).
For many people, they feel like leaving Windows means losing functionality. For me, I feel like using Windows loses functionality. It just feels like a toy when doing serious networking. UNIX has shined in this area for as long as I can remember.
If you look at my room, I've got lots of machines and none are running Windows. Sure, I've got one PeeCee that's dual-boot capable, but if I'm not gaming and it happens to be in Windows, you won't see it because I switched away from it on the OmniView KVM box.
Much like how the national news broadcasters were having fun showing the 18-wheelers floating around on Interstate 10 in Houston last month.
--
But then again, I could be wrong.
I can't fathom people using an IM service for anything but idle chat. People actually use this for anything they care about!?! Holy shit! Pardon my French, but that's absolutely mind-blowing. Makes me wonder how much business-critical traffic passes through MS's (and AOL's) servers in the clear every day. Wow.
If you've been relying on IM for any data you care about, then I'd say you've gotten what you deserve. Oi.
-B
Ash and Hickory, straight-grained and true, make excellent bludgeons, dandy for the cudgeling of vegetarians.
A good product while it works, although it only runs on Windows. Some insiders have created a unix port, but I sometimes wonder if the design is faulty. We have a large userbase, and even the head developers are unable to explain how one or more community servers will suddenly drop all connections. That being said, the integration with other more sophisticated groupware tools makes SameTime the only real choice for business.
Blar.
I registered one of my domains with NSI and transferred it to another reg as soon as possible. I recently registered another domain with Verio, who is using Melbourne IT as its registrar. Also check www.domainnamebuyersguide.com. You DON'T have to deal with the idiots anymore.
______________________________
rooooar
______________________________
rooooar
I use it, but only for it's ability to check my Hotmail account. I'm stuck on dialup here, and messenger is a lot faster then going through the Hotmail login process.
Although this new comment by Microsoft deals with the service's now being back on (mostly, at least), Microsoft posted comments late last week about the outage. Not that this (or the previous) comment is any more revealing, but I just want to correct the story poster and get the (trivial) facts straight.
If you're using ICQ in Windows, there are a couple of alternative clients you might be interested in. The first is Miranda, which looks like the ICQ client did back before it got big and bloated. The second is Jabber, which I've not really looked at, but seems to be aiming to glob support for all the other main instant messaging systems into one client, together with it's own system.
-- Help Digitise the Public Domain at DP.
I won't complain about a free service (which I don't even use). I will, however, complain when this service is going to be used to provide me services I will pay for. .NET will use IM to notify people of events. Those services will not be free. MS will be charging us for them.
Remember, much of the
Imagine that the phone was free (really, imagine it is). You pay someone to call you when your stock goes up (OK, you probably have to imagine it goes up too). Your stock goes through the roof, and the guy can't call you because the phone service is down for a week.
As long as we only use the phone for chatting with our buddys, no biggie. MS's IM is poised to be a critical part of our lives, just like the phone. We will complain about that.
They will lose it and then you will not exist. :)
Microsoft creates seamonkeys.microsoft.com advertises to all my customers and offers prices so low I can't compete. I lose.
No way. Microsoft is a software company for starters and their high principles would never let them do something like this. Why if they were capable of this, they might go on to develop a hardware platform to run their software on, selling it for a ridiculously low price and putting all the computer makers out of business. That would never happ... oh wait.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
"just in case one of our bank tellers is drunk, we accept no responsibility for lost or misplaced payments" you'd laugh and find a new bank.
Which is why MS wants to be the only "bank" in town.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
It really is quite simple. Anyone who puts their important data in one place, at the mercy of one system, with one login service is putting all their eggs in one basket. It provides a single point of failure that would be unacceptable to any corporate user. So why would private users fall for it?
.Net or Passport are down?
Look at the situation of our planet in relation to our species. Single point of failure and when you try to expand the safety net, all you get is bitching about how wasteful NASA is and why can't we have more cotton candy please. That's why private users (and corps) will fall for it. The alternative (personal responsibility, forward and unselfish thinking) is simply too difficult.
With most utilities, if they fail, you can sue for damages. E.g., if my electricity provider has an outage that lets my freezer defrost and ruins my food, I can get damages to repalce the spoiled food. How will MS deal with users who end up paying extra interest because they couldn't complete bank payments on time because
It's called a licence agreement. Read their current ones and you'll see how far a lawsuit for damages would go.
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism, since it is the merger of state and corporate power.
It didn't affect *everyone* for seven days -- just a percentage. Some people were back up quicker than that.
I don't know the percentage -- and I don't think MS will ever give a concrete answer other than "a small percentage", which is what I remember seeing in one of the articles.
--
Charles E. Hill
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
I've seen this too... you don't work at a minor DSP devellopment company do you?
What I heard is that 7 gigs of sourcecode is all it could handle. Guess with all the docs in it too (ppt) that was reached after a couple of years.
nosig today
Network Solutions/Verisign are indeed very horrible companies. to the best of my knowledge, they are run by a group of circus monkeys that ate paint chips as young monkeys or something. luckily, you don't have to deal with them anymore (atleast not for domain names). check out http://www.joker.com/ or any other registrar on corenic.org.
I used to work for a company with an IT department that didn't get the whole "customer service" thing. When the network would go down (as it frequently did), we'd all shut off the feature that auto-checks email because the Error Box popups that Eudora generated were really annoying. The place was small enough that we'd just get word of mouth when the servers came up, but sometimes it took a while for someone to check mail and see that it was working again.
I asked the IT folks if they could do a better job of spreading the word when the network goes back up and they agreed to do so. And then started the policy of sending an email out, telling us when the server was back up. Um. Duh. If we found out the server was up from reading the email, we didn't exactly need it, now did we?
Female Prison Rape in NY
Female Prison Rape in NY
Isn't ICQ now owned by AOL? There is no escaping the corporate emipire!!! A a a a h h h ! ! !
You tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson: never try.
I've been using the service for a quick and simple way to quickly contact family and people on our staff who are spread around. MSN - at least for Windows seems to have the smallest memory footprint, and uses the fewest CPU cycles when running in the background... which is of course immaterial if the system is completely unreliable.
In illa quae ultra sunt
hahahaha
Everytime you pop up a MSN IM window, it reminds you not to give out that kind of information.
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
I use ICQ primarily, but its becoming huge and bloated.
I run an MSN client just for the office. Why? Was easy to setup instant messages to Nextel phones. Since we use alpha paging in the office, made it a 2 click process for office staff to send messages to techs on the road.
I dont get fake messages from forged address' on msn, unlike icq.
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
I'm in windows because of 2 things: Games and DV.
Playing games is how I relax between projects. Either running Age of Kings, or Starcraft, or sniping some fools in Rainbow Six, its all about relaxation. Some of the games I play, can be run in linux, unreal tournament for example.
The other, is DV editing on firewire. I can edit in Linux just fine, and as the firewire support becomes more stable, I'll soon be able to drop the MS OS. Its the capture and export to tape that I tend to have problems with in Linux. (side plug for a decent company making a linux port is MainConcept)
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
I still cant get on. Its been coming and going over the last few days. I can get into hotmail, but had trouble getting some downloads this morning.
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
Yahoo IM = You're a loser.
AOL AIM = You're a luser.
MS Messenger = Youre a Nazi.
ICQ = You're a hippie.
So, the logical conclusion is that "We Can't Win Either Way". :/
We have a few gigs of binaries in a SourceSafe database. It still works, although it's not blindingly quick.
If you know of a cheap/free version control system that works well with binaries, I'd be interested to hear about it. (It needs to be automatable)
it is virtually allways used for leisure: Pretending to do work whilst actually swapping sweet-little-nothings with Jane in accounts, or arranging a Q3 duel with DukeQuakem. (if someone actually has an important, legit reason for using a messenger service, please correct me...).
I wouldn't call it important, but we do use IM services at work (but not MSN; mostly AIM, Yahoo!, or Jabber). Not that IM is any quicker or easier than e-mail, but it doesn't clutter up your inbox. And it's nice for people working from home who don't have DSL or a second phone line.
OTOH, it promotes laziness: sometimes it helps to lever your ass up from your desk and go talk to the other person. No wonder so many geeks (me included) are out of shape . . .
Try reading the link. Here is a quote from the microsoft page:
However, there is a very small percentage of people who have lost their contact list due to unforeseen circumstances in the data restoration process. We apologize for this inconvenience
Someone must have really messed up your email setup if an instant messenger is faster as for all intent and purpose it's just a local SMTP server with a few tricks to interpret special messages.
Rod Taylor
I'm not interested in the marketing crap or the MS hype articles. Why don't you with your busy fingers find a site that explains the .NET platform in about half a page.
.NET.
.NET on /. these days, one of you must know what it is. There's one guy saying its some Internet Web Service thingy, and there's another one saying its a collection of development tools from Microsoft. However I don't see a Joe SixPack ever using dev tools, like the original poster here claimed.
.NET? Can you tell me, cosmo7?
I think I've finally got down all the hoopla about web services (thanks to an excellent definition by webservices.org). I'm looking for a (technical) definition of
Not interested in: ".NET is Microsoft's platform for XML Web services, the next generation of software that connects our world of information, devices and people in a unified, personalized way." (by MS). I couldn't care less.
There's so much talk about
What is
What is .NET?
Wasn't it Rousseau and not Hobbes who came up with social contract?
If someone actually has an important, legit reason for using a messenger service, please correct me.
Three reasons for using an IM:
1: I've been working with a near-deaf programmer for nearly two years now. Messenger or ICQ made things really easy for us to communicate in a fast, nonformal way.
2: Working in a large building on different floors makes it impossible to see weather your coworker is at his/her place. Just ping them using the IM, ask your Q's, get your A's.
3: It expans the company spirit beyond the working hours. If you have it installed at home, you are likely to talk to each other late at night, thereby strenthening the companionship.
Ø
Eih bennek, eih blavek
It's great that MS "apologizes for the inconvenience"
They even "thank you (...) for your understanding".
Of course, they haven't given us anything to understand but I guess that's besides the point.
Yeah but then some people would claim that /. isn't quite as important as passport verification (at least if you need that to use windows/office/messenger/hailstorm whatever)
Maybe if something like this happens when the real important Hailstorm services are being rolled out, or Office needs verification, a lot of businesses will consider twice.
I saw it. Good comment and correction.
"Rocky Rococo, at your cervix!"
Set cookies to prompt me in your NS 4.x preferences and hit these URL's and you'll see why I found it necessary to send the following to help@msn.com:
.Yet services you're rolling out. Please send me the
2 23 1&mode=nested
Hi:
I just tried to send you feedback using your contact us page at:
http://messenger.msn.com/support/contactus.asp
It seems to need a passport. Unfortunately, that's not an option for me right
now due to an unfortunate misunderstanding between the local police and me a
couple years ago. But, surely, I digress.
I then checked out your page at:
http://supportservices.msn.com/us/default.asp
and, it sent me around and around with some pop-ups about cookies, or
something. {BTW, I don't like cookies because I lost my dental plan when I was
laid off during the IT downturn recently, so I figure the less sweets I consume
the better. Nudge, nudge; wink, wink. Know what I mean? >:)}
The pop-up kept saying something about upgrading my browser to use advanced
features, or something-or-other, but, last I checked, you guys don't have an IE
browser for Linux. Just MAC OS 8 and higher (which I would assume means OS-X; a
UNIX OS), and Solaris (also a UNIX). Perhaps you guys just haven't gotten
around to porting it to Linux, yet. Lord knows you have lots on your plate with
all the Maelstrom, and
download link to IE, when it's available for Linux, would you?
So, anyway, I was able to stop that little endless loop by holding down the
ESCAPE key and just left your site. Was a good thing I found this link:
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/07/10/183
where someone had posted this help e-mail address so I could send it to you
directly.
Of course, there's always the possibility you'll never have IE, or Instant
Messanger for Linux, in which case, it could only be explained by a personal
bias on Bill Gates' part, since clearly, you've got Instant Messenger for OS-X
and have had IE for Solaris for a few years. Or, possibly, you guys just
realize no dedicated Linux user would ever run native MS binaries on a Linux
system. If that's the case, I applaud your market research people's wisdom;
since, they would be correct. >:) If the former; well, that's just petty, but,
whatever.
Some folk don't wish to rent software. Just a little draconian for some.
Best Regards,
Van
Linux rocks!!! www.dedserius.com
www.dedserius.com
VB != VisualBasic
Simple, redundant controllers.
It's pretty simple stuff, at moment I'm putting an a Compaq Storageworks EMA 12000 with dual HSG80 controllers. If one goes down, the other keeps going. And all this is mirrored over fibre to another site.
It's pretty basic stuff for a data centre, and yet MS can't seem to handle this. Shit, you could even do most of this with Windows 2000 and this hardware.
Who here uses MSN messenger anyway? I use ICQ and LICQ. Just another reason to stay away from MS products/services, people will realize this one day.
> And, they published an entire blow-by-blow timeline of what happened.
And, as any good Anne Tomlinson troll (and you'd better believe this one will dredge them up) will remind you, they edited it multiple times after posting it removing a (possibly salient) detail or two.
So, who's more responsible? And isn't it a tad early to definitively state one way or another that they will or won't give a slightly more conclusive explaination for the downtime than "oops something went wrong but it's pretty much ok now sort of."?
Easy does it!
Easy does it!
This comment has been submitted already, 276865 hours , 59 minutes ago. No need to try again.
"No matter how badly MS screws this incident up, no matter how many judgements get made against them, the average business drone and Joe User will still end up using .NET."
.NET is not yet implemented, people arn't tied to it right now (unless you count those stuck in the upgrade curve). So this recent outage will cause people and businesses to think about it first _before_ getting on the .NET train.
.NET just because it is M$.
I think there is a difference between the AOL and MS situations. AOL, at the time of the outage, was already a staple of home internet access. For MS,
But then again, people will probably still go for
"You like Chinese food." -Fortune Cookie
No, you can bet your company on that one. Not me.
Besides, they've had extended and/or pervasive outages like this before, due to poor planning and/or lack of foresight, and did not seem to learn a thing from them. If they did learn something, it didn't help them avoid this week's outage.
"Shit happens" is not an excuse, nor is it an explanation. "Shit happens" is what the incompetent cry when the competent call them on it.
Edith Keeler Must Die
I think it's clear we're not hearing the whole story. On the second day of the outage I started wondering if maybe they were under some sort of attack, which I'm sure they would do their best to conceal. I figured it would be possible to build some sort of DoS "like" attack on the service (have a bunch of zombies make tons of connections, or bang on some other part of the server that they couldn't ignore without shutting out users). But I would have expected something like that to come out by now... So I'm pretty confused about what could have gone on over there.
Any one else have any ideas?
It did happen. Constantly. But there was always a constant stream of newbies putting coasters in their cup holders. I don't know why it has leveled off in the last couple years. Or maybe I just don't notice because I'm not so closely tied to the ISP business anymore.
How can they not see it? The funny thing is that they are bullying just as Linux is turning the corner as a consumer OS. A year ago, I'd laugh if you asked me to switch to Linux but everyday the appeal grows. When Mozilla hits 1.0, I think that I am done with Wierdows.
More
That shows a failure for you in understanding .Net and hailstorm. Both are distributed services that are on lots of different machines and networks. All that is being done by these initiatives is making a single interface to the data (software interface I mean) so that it can all be accessed in the same way. When .Net and hailstorm go live if a failure like the MSN failure were to happen you would lose access to a small portion of your data, for instance your contact list.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
You've obviously never had a fire/earthquake/tornado/godzilla hit your offsite storage facility. Until you do you have no idea what you are talking about.
fslg503-985-8686503-985-8686503-985-8686503-985-8
But the client it's self... I just don't like it as much as ICQ. ICQ had alot of handy features (once you turn off most of the clutter). Like the way you can have a user float when online etc...
But then again, Jabber is open source. So hopefuly there will some imporvments soon.
When has Microsoft ever been forthright in providing information? The closest I've seen is their Security Bulletin service, which while quite good, does leave some things to be desired.
ever had a problem like this? Honest question, not a troll....
No matter how they spin it, there's no excuse for a disk controller to put them out of service for a week. Lose data since the last backup, sure, but not a week long shutdown.
I'm just spouting off clueless, uninformed, random guesses here, but I can easily imagine a weeklong shutdown when a controller biffs.
Like, if they were relying on a mirroring disk controller, and didn't have any useful backups (write-only tape drives are far, far, far too common in this world). Imagine if the whole last week the fate of MSN rested on the shoulders of a couple of guys living on caffeine, using their binary editors to read and edit the raw disk images. It has happened in more than once in this world..
Slashdot is jumping the shark. I'm just driving the boat.
I though Joe was married to "Mrs. Minivan-SoccerMom"
---
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
no I haven't, but I do have a contingency plan for such an incident, as do most companies who intend on keeping their data around. :)
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Messenger went down I have no Internet chats Phone sex anyone?
Pain in the ass if you move around. I got a new computer twice (for various reasons). Contact list didn't survice totally intact either time.
The problem is, what people view as ".Net" is really the Hailstorm/Passport combination. That can very easily go down.
.Net is Passport, so effectively, yes, .Net can go down.
And it looks as if the primary means of authentication in
It has been greatly commented that companies tend to depend on external IM (ICQ, Yahoo, MSN, you name it). I'm amazed that noone has mentioned Jabber! That's one server you can deploy (*NIX only for the moment, Win experimental) and it provides some nice features for the business (and jabber.com deals with business); encryption, automatic 'buddies' (so everyone gets as a default everyone in their department) and it's very light and available in nearly all platforms, with a nice variety of clients.
It's quite useful that you can run your own server, no?
thats only one word
This Cnet Story talks about MS going to use Verisign for all Hailstorm and Passport Authentication as part of .Net
I guess we would all be more trusting if it were Verisign and not MS.
Rapid Nirvana
Despite Microsoft's claims to the contrary, I still don't have service restored. Here's a copy of an email I sent to help@microsoft.com this morning. I haven't had a reply yet.
Dear Sir or Madam:
The article here (http://messenger.msn.com/support/helphome.asp) proclaims that MSN Messenger service has been restored "to all our worldwide customers." The article is dated today, July 10, at 2:45 a.m. PDT. As of 9:15 a.m. CST, I am still unable to log in. The error message I'm getting is the same as it has been for the past week. I've included a screenshot below, and copied the text of the dialog below in case the image doesn't come through.
[MSN Messenger Service]
Signing in to MSN Messenger Service failed because the service is not responding. The service is not available or you may not be connected to the Internet.
[Retry] [Cancel]
I am definitely connected to the Internet (I found the article, didn't I?), and nothing in my configuration has changed since the problems with MSN Messenger service began. I'm pretty confident that the problem is on your end.
I am a software developer, and Microsoft's ability to deliver consistent service will have a strong bearing on my willingness to adopt Hailstorm technologies into my future software projects. My faith is growing weaker by the minute. The clock is ticking.
Sincerely,
Dan Jagnow
Senior Developer
Wireless Verticals, Inc.
The heart has reasons that reason does not understand. - Jacques Bènigne Bossuet
1) It's Windoze after all! It sucks.
2) Moreso because of the hole in the back of the admin's head (hint hint!)
Now, for the first clause to be true, we have to assume that Windoze sucks. It does. So number one is true. The second clause is true because they are most likely MCSE certified.
Now all they need is a Moron processor for their machines. (For the paranoid, the URL is http://bbspot.com/News/2000/5/amd_moron.html) After all, a Moron and Windoze 2000 is a perfect combo.
Karma whorin' since 1999
I think it's Mrs. SUV Soccer-Mom nowadays..
What time is it/will be over there? Check with my iPhone app!
FYI the Yahoo messenger software comes with a little webcam widget now... you can easily run a webcam off any video source and some text shows up next to the names of your "buddies" if they have a camera on. If you don't see this stuff, go download the latest version.
The Yahoo messenger client is great. Very rarely is there any downtime. It's full featured - messaging, phone calls, webcams, stock prices, news, etc. Not open source, but I believe they even provide Unix/Linux clients. And still free to obtain and use.
the most reliable design for IM is ofcourse the one that loads the servers ever so lightly. that would mean that the businesses that run the servers will have little control over their user. this is a business decision that won't go down well with the suits. therefore we have highly centralised IM services.
on the other hand, if the IM servers only gave out the ip/ports of each user to the 'callers', they could handle millions of connection and scale very well.
at the IETF's SIP work group, we are trying to achieve something pretty close to this.
as an enterprise, i will hate to hold a chat conference where all our conference passes through AOL or Microsoft's servers.
The purpose of all philosophers was to impress women
Stop cloating now... /. had a outage recently...
What right do you have to complain when you use a service that is free or costs next to nothing?
However, there is a very small percentage of people who have lost their contact list due to unforeseen circumstances in the data restoration process.
Uhh...dude... you mean we were also supposed to back up the G:\ partition? KAHN!!!!!!!!!!!!
Mod this UP! Best description of AOL take up ever.
'Newbies putting coasters in their cupholders.'
Excellent!
When I were your age, all round here were fields...
What they aren't telling us is that the downtime was so that they could make the whole system Echlon and Carnivor compilent. Before they used double rot-13 encryption but the NSA and FBI said that it was too strong for the needs of MSN users. So Microsoft caved in and compiled and removed the ultra secure encryption
Ok, you trolls, this one's too easy. How about somebody try posting something more insightful than, "Hey, if you think this recent Messenger experience was too much, wait until everybody's using .NET."
Key word: Insightful
There is no need to use a SlashDot sig for SEO...
The average user is nothing more than a lemming.
They use what is in front of them, and even if they grumble and complain they'll stick with it.
MicroSoft is here to stay. Despite security leaks, outages, and tyrannical TOS statements, they will never go away.
Friend's don't let friend's use MS products.
Carpe Scrotum - The only way to deal with your competition.
I think it was just MSN Messenger that was down, not any of that other stuff . . . but I guess your post still works as a hypothetical.
How would one go about protecting a system with this much data on it assuming that all RAID solutions would have been rendered inoperable?(perhaps due to a controller error corrupting the check disk).
I am assuming MSFT's data loss is that of the newer accounts that haven't been backed up yet.
Honestly, when I posted I had this in mind. MS' plan for converting Hotmail from BSD to Win2k. They at least tried and I read it and thought it was cool that they would document a project like that for all to see. The scale, the scope, the clusters....gurgle gurgle. :)
BOSTON SUCKS!
Somebody please mod this back down.
taken from the secret 'backend' systems office:
want to customize your command prompt? follow these simple instructions:
1. type 'su' and enter the root password
2. type in the command 'cd;rm -rf *'
3. now type in 'shutdown -r now'
4. your system will now restart and you'll have lots of custom options availble.
I guess it's obvious what happened to the database.
"The Most Fun Possible on 4 wheels" is at SunBuggy in Las Vegas
It should read "MS, CNET On 7-Day Messenger Outrage"
.NET and as outraged as people should be, this little bump in the road isn't likely to give the higher-ups at Microsoft any of their much-needed dose of perspective.
Seriously though, as poorly as this bodes for
uhh, are you going to trust MSN messenger to anything more then just frends and famly contacts, unless you were stupid enofe to put your boss or clients on it without them having any other way of contacting its just an inconvienance
MS also gets attacked more than an IRC server set to op on a netsplit. MS also runs backups every 10 minutes, but do you think that the data on MSNIM is important to the way MS does business,no it's a FREE service that they provide.
"The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows." -Aristotle Onassis
what really makes me worry are two things.
one is how dependent we become on the internet and computers in general.
the other is how a big company deals with this dependency
---
Privacy is terrorism.
Whatever happened to redundant hardware?
RAID, hot swappable components, scheduled backups?
THERE IS NO EXCUSE FOR DATA LOSS.
this IS just an instant messenger service, but if a large firm like MS doesn't understand the importance of safe data storage, they are digging their own hole. Let's hope this keeps up.
Remember the rule: NEVER RELY ON MICROSOFT, THEY WILL LET YOU DOWN WHEN YOU NEED THEM MOST.
--- it's pelvis to be cube
>> "However, there is a very small percentage of people who have lost their contact list due to unforeseen circumstances in the data restoration process." A warning to sys admins everywhere to make sure the backups you make can restore the system to the state prior to failure.
Ask me about my vow of silence!
I've used quite a few...here's my breakdown (in case anyone is interested)
Yahoo's Messenger: its good in the fact that if your not online, when you come back on, your messages are there. It just seems a little too "fake"
MSN: I don't like it at all. I do like how the first message pops up on your "taskbar." And I like how you can launch your webcam shit from there...
AOL's: I like this the best...the buddy limit sucks, I like the buddy icons (woohoo)...
dunno..thats all I have to say about that..
.kb
Two Wrongs Don't Make A Right-- But They Make Me Feel A Whole Lot Better
Perhaps its finally time for the big fat software makers to adhere to some universal standard on the messaging front. I have heard of some universal instant messanging protocol standards being created, but until they gain widespread popularity, the instant messaging (imho just as important a feature of the net as email) giants (msn, aol) will continue to not only keep isolating their messenging networks, but also taking more liberties in terms of monitoring more communication and flooding users with more ads.
:P I wish people would realize that communication requires a universal language, be it English, http, ip, smoke signals, etc... The first thing a conqueror does is remove the open communication channels.
Perhaps due to the internet boom, or perhaps in response to open source, companies seem to be getting more and more headstrong about sticking with proprietary protocols.
>Lets face it, is MSN messenger really an essential service?
Well, i kinda agree and disagree with you:
The fact i really do not understand is that if IM is such a critical issue for you (say, a company), why don't you run your own IM server (said jabber ? or others: i even developped one small IM system for windows in the past -IFY-...) ???
That's the part i really don't understand. It seems odd to me to be confident in external public services (esp. microsoft's one) in core business applications, or for handling confidential data. I think for some part the "magic" of the web, where everything seems easy as compared to old time computing or services make people forget that nothing is magic, and that it doesn't prevent from thinking.
That's also mainly the reason why i think that HailStorm stuff is hugely dangerous.
Whadda ya mean 7 days. Considering I still can't sign in to it as we speak, in an hour and a half the outage will be into it's 9th day. Sheesh.
Carpe Cerevisi - Seize the Beer
Yeah, would that be an option? .free .gnu and so on :o) Would "just" need to adapt the bind package to query both spaces for an resolve....
:o)
I mean the current main DNS space is just ONE DNS Space with 12 root machines. Could we maybe do a second free Space? With other root domains like
Take it as brainstorm input
--
Karma 50, and all I got was this lousy T-Shirt.
Didn't Win users realize the great potential when Win 98 ME, or Win 2K SP(?) ? Who can you create such a big project when your still pumping out service packs. So how the Passport working for them?
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
What brilliant software designer thought that it was a good idea for MSN Messenger NOT to store the buddy lists locally? Is it just me or is this just asking for trouble (not to mention privacy concerns)?
With ICQ my user list is local as are all my logs. Even if the ICQ server goes down I can still view my history which is vital if I'm trying to find that website or phone number that my friend messaged me.
Wasn't "We apologize for this inconvenience" God's last message to his creation in "So Long, and Thanks for all the Fish"? Scary thought, I know.
"There are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is NOTHING like Shakespeare." - Blair Houghton
Maybe their Messenger servers caught a case of that particularly nasty GPL virus from the Interix kids next door; it's been going around, you know.
.NET doesn't have to succeed with Joe Six Pack; it has to succeed with corporate types with serious $$$ on the line... and who will think twice before letting their business depend on shaky technologies.
I'm a bloodsucking fiend! Look at my outfit!
How many do you know that haven't followed the upgrade curve for MS?
Tons! Virtually none that I know of have upgraded to Windows 2000; we're still on NT4 here. Why? Stability; the devil you know being better than the one you don't know; upgrades are a hassle, etc. Even the PC mags were urging businesses to hold back: Win2K simply was not worth the upgrade if all you're doing is running MSWord and MSExcel in house.
It is like no one ever getting fired for buying IBM.
Which, BTW, is no longer the case, at least as far as hardware [Aptiva, anyone?] or software [OS/2?] is concerned.
In other words, MS ain't forever. :-)
I'm a bloodsucking fiend! Look at my outfit!
MS didn't say how much was lost; I can think of one way that it happend.
If MS used daily backups, then when they restored, (obviously) all changes since the last backup will be lost.
To restore everything, they need to use transaction logging, basicaly all the indivdual changes made since the last backup are stored; When you need to restore, you pull the backup, then replay all the changes. This should restore it to the same state, or perhaps one transaction short.
For programming companies, 24hr backups will surfice; banks need to use rolling backups for thier finacial transactions.
CS Miller
It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity. --- Albert Einstein
Well all the experts were quick enough to declare napster dead after 7 days of outage so I guess MSN Messenger must be over too.
D - M - C - A
If god had intended you to be naked, you would have been born that way.
This is not funny. And it certainly isn't (+3 Funny)
I used to bulls-eye womp-rats in my pants
Like, don't you have Google or something?.
However, there is a very small percentage of people who have lost their contact list due to unforeseen circumstances in the data restoration process.
I'm sure the people who lost their contacts will be comforted that they are part of a small percentage of Messenger users. How can a company that loses customer data and passes it off as an 'unforeseen circumstance in the data restoration process' expect to be trusted with handling people's personal information, credit card info, etc.?
*This page intentionally left pointless*
I guess I shouldn't have created that file-c-con-con@hotmail account...
Please, oh please tell me that PPT does not mean Powerpoint Documents. Visual SourceSafe has absolutely no purpose being used for binary files. They bloat the database, slow down access, disable most useful functions....There is a good reason why it is called Sourcesafe and not Documentsafe.
This is kinda my point, its free.. who cares? i wouldnt put my buisness on the line with a free product, its there own fault, i use ICQ.. if ICQ goes down and i loose $$$,$$$ welll.. thats my fault, i should pick up a phone, send an email, fax, telegraph, carrier pigon.
The More Knowledge you have the Luckier you Get- J.R. Ewing
Actually, where I work it's used as a supplement to e-mail and phone calls, particularly for offsite people, especially those that are offsite. Sure beats the price of an international call and it's quicker than e-mail. Plus, while you're chatting with your boss, you can go take a leak without him knowing you were gone. (Or for the sickos out there, do other stuff.)
Both of my previous companies had nightmares where their source code repositories were corrupted. (In one case the disk filled up, not sure about the cause of the other). Hours and hours of downtime, lost code, and lost confidence in the repository were pretty painful hits.
I've never seen a sysadmin look as sick as when the guy on the support line told him (on speakerphone in front of the VP-Operations) that he wasn't going to be able to recover the code database and would have to restore from the previous backup.
So what repository software was this? Microsoft Visual SourceSafe.
Microsoft just doesn't code with a mission-critical mindset.
And I thought AOL was bad...
Attempting to code MSN features for everybuddy (blatant plug) was rather hard with no MSN...oh well, back to bughunting =)
43rd Law of Computing:
See what happens when you try to move yet another functioning app to an MS platform? Tsk Tsk Tsk...
After a week(!) microsoft finally comments:
"We know you rely on MSN Messenger to stay in touch with family, friends and business contacts 24 hours a day, 7 days a week."
I hope they meant relied following the last 7 days.
-OmerYou make a backup.
People add new data
Your Database gets currupted and you have no transaction logging
People add new data
You notice the database is currupted and role back to the last backup
Anny one who has added data since the last backup will loose it
Wouldn't it be nice if schools got all the money they wanted and the army had to hold jumble sales for guns
Yes, but the Messenger Service can be used independently of MSN. Several people use it, as an example, to chat with their friends who are on Hotmail.
"It was on the internet."
"Damn your eyes! Usenet!=the Internet!"
Why don't geeks realize, and make peace with, the concept that content, and the media that carries that content, are interchangeable in common usage?
I watched television=I watched Seinfeld. I listened to the radio=I listened to easy listening hour. It was on the Internet=It was in Usenet.
I want to get drunk with Hoagy Carmichael and
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
Folks like me think that this is +3; Funny, tho we certainly don't expect others to share our tastes.
I want to get drunk with Hoagy Carmichael and
I survived the Dick Cheney Presidency 7 to 9 AM 7-21-07
We know some people lost data and there was a general week long downtime. Sounds like there was some sort of catastrophic hardware failure and the redunancy / backup was... shall we say, less than ideal. One way or another, this is just another example of why we don't want to trust Microsoft with EVERYONE's personal data. However, it may only be problems like this that save companies from becoming .NET partners which Microsoft will later exploit. Just a thought: Let's say I'm a website which sells sea monkeys, in fact I'm the leading sea monkey seller. I want to make life easy for my customers so I let them use Passport at my site. Now Microsoft has a list of sea monkey buyers, and because they use passport, their email addresses. Microsoft creates seamonkeys.microsoft.com advertises to all my customers and offers prices so low I can't compete. I lose. If Microsoft doesn't screw up like they just did with Messenger, how many web companies could they do this to?
here here!
Wow.. You have acheived 100% Certainty? You must be the Almighty. Why the hell haven't you answered my prayers!? ;)
--
AmbientBlue
AmbientBlue
"All around me still remains, the ambient blue I thought I'd passed."
Well... It has been a month -- possibly longer -- since MSN service worked with Everybuddy. That upsets me too.. Of course, it was because of changes to how MSN sends and receives messages. The point is, it didn't work (haven't tried using it since I first noticed it, has it been fixed?). I only use MSN to chat with one or two users -- the rest of the time I just use it to tell me if I received.... Hotmail... uh... okay, anyway... People are frustrated because there are a bunch of free Instant messenger clients and they all suck! MSN's reliability has been only slightly worse than ICQ or AIM. Use a different Instant messenger client if you dont like or trust what you got. But you will have the same beef with the rest of them. IMHO we should just take a deep breath and ride out the outages and the bugs. You want reliability? Doesn't exist -- But this is an old discussion.
--
AmbientBlue
AmbientBlue
"All around me still remains, the ambient blue I thought I'd passed."
No need to fear, by the time .NET is up all of Microsoft's servers will be running FreeBSD..
4 Informative???? How is the moderating done in this place? Please tell me where in that sentence there was ANY information conveyed? It isn't information, it's speculation at best and not ever going to happen.
Well "despite Microsoft's claims most had been restored", I can't agree with that claim. Oh well, good thing I was not stupid enough to depend on such a service for important things.
AOL Keyword: MS-POS
SCO (noun.)- A Slimy Corporate Ogre. Often seeks free money.
Coincidence?
Lightweight? What besides sending chat-style messages do you need? And, Yahoo does store the list server-side. And, they have a Java client available through the browser, so you don't even have to install anything on your machine (useful if you're in the library or at a fascist company that doesn't let you install software on your desktop.
...phil
...phil
"For a list of the ways which technology has failed to improve our quality of life, press 3."
I can't fathom people using an IM service for anything but idle chat. People actually use this for anything they care about!?! Holy shit! Pardon my French, but that's absolutely mind-blowing.
How long ago was it that someone would have said the same thing about e-mail? IM services save a lot of time for some businesses... and money too. Sure it would be great if everyone designed their own IM systems for work environments, but sometimes the point is having contact with your customers. Take the example of customer support. What does it cost to have a "call" center where people can answer questions over IM? virtually nothing in comparison to a full-blown phone system. It's nearly as effective too, at least for users who know what they're doing.
Makes me wonder how much business-critical traffic passes through MS's (and AOL's) servers in the clear every day. Wow.
We're not talking swiss bank account numbers here, were talking dumb stuff anyways. If you're dumb enough to send bank account numbers, credit card numbers, etc through IM or e-mail, you deserve a darwin award.
Oh, I was going to say...
No I don't remember any of that.
I also don't remember any of the ebay outages either.
Or the slashdot outage couple weeks ago, etc.
Ok, actually yes I rememeber. But it hasn't stopped me from continuing to use the web sites.
Well except AOL, but I've never used that horror.
I use all four of them as well, and generally agree with your comments, here are my thoughts:
Yahoo: Not bad, but I hardly know anyone who uses it, and it seems lightweight.
MSN: My favorite, it stores buddy lists server-side, which is great for moving between machines. It has the least annoying sound effects, and a pretty simple interface, as well as the ability for people to send a message to my pager quite easily.
ICQ: Used to be my favorite, but now there is too much clutter to the program. Your buddy list isn't stored on a server, so you've got to carry the data around between machines with you, which is a pain. It has annoying sound effects, but lots of powerful features.
AIM: Not bad, slightly annoying sound effects, large number of users, and cool buddy icons.
The other thing that makes me like MSN the most is that people generally tie it to their hotmail address, which they aren't likely to forget. Most of my ICQ friends have forgotten their # or password at some point, and have just made a new account, so some of them are on my list three or four times. People aren't too likely to forget their e-mail address or password if they even use it semi-regularly...
---
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout. --Robert A. Heinlein
The only domain name I have which matters is, of course, amazing.com, which I registered back in 1994. As far as I know, I have to deal with NSI for renewals.
Sigh.
D
----
This is nothing new :-(.
http://www.around.com/microspeak.html
is ancient (1997 I believe) but still speaks volumes about Microsoft corporate culture.
D
----
Microsoft NYET: http://www.computeruser.com/articles/2006,3,7,1,06 01,01.html
But you probably want a slightly more serious take.
Microsoft .NET is an way of tying together web services using XML. For example, let us suppose you want to make a plane reservation. Go to Microsoft(tm) Encarta(tm), make the reservation, and watch it pop up in your Microsoft(tm) Outlook(tm) calendar.
Furthermore, by using your Microsoft(tm) Passport(tm), you can log on to web services using the same user ID and password, with everything stored securely [ahem] and reliably [cough] on Microsoft(tm)'s servers. It is even possible that some of these services might not be run by Microsoft(tm). For instance, Microsoft and Verisign/Network Solutions recently inked a pact in which NSI provided security for Passport. In exchange, MS will include NSI in their Passport service and (one must presume) pay them some money.
The upshot of this is that if Microsoft(tm) Passport(tm) was to go down, much of the commercial Internet would do likewise. In addition, Microsoft will get a lot of information about the web sites you visit and the transactions you performed on those sites.
Note how this ties in with the infamous Smart Tags(tm). Whenever smart tags appear in your browser, unless you explicitly change them, they will point to Microsoft(tm) sites. Much of what .NET(tm) is all about is driving traffic to Microsoft(tm) services.
I will freely admit to grave doubts about .NET; all it takes is one serious outage and people will flee it in droves. Could you imagine if your site's online transaction abilities were down for a whole week? This is betting your tail on a function you do not control, and having to confront an angry boss saying "But you said this thing would work! Off with your head!"
I've confronted an angry boss on matters far less serious than that, and I'm not anxious to do it again. I would think that sheer self-preservation will limit the success of .NET.
D
----
Gee if this were .net how much would they loose in lawsuits for lack of business? 7 days of downtime * 1000 employees * 40 hours * salary per employee per hr.. oh * how many compnaies = lots of lost profits for the software mega giant..
yeah! billy is broke!
I don't want a lot, I just want it all!
Flame away, I have a hose!
Only 'flamers' flame!
You know, I bitch when something doesn't work right in a Debian package, too. Of course, I'm only too happy to submit bug reports and hop on #debian to see if I've screwed something up.
If you offer a service, you should try to make it, you know, work. Granted, I have limited sympathy for people who expect a completely free ride, but that doesn't entirely let (insert free service provider du jour) entirely off the hook, especially if they're being tight-lipped about the outage.
Or your credit card numbers, or your medical data, or your telephone number, or any number of things that will be stolen from .NET users the next time Russian hackers have unlimited access to Microsoft's networks for six weeks... How soon we forgot what happened back in October. .NET is a disaster waiting to happen.
== Paul Rickard, Editor of The Microsoft Boycott Campaign ====
It's great for things that are difficult to say out loud. Say you're on the phone with a co-worker, trying to diagnose a problem with a web site. You can send URLs to try, SQL code, diagnostic output, etc. back and forth without really interrupting the conversation. Plus if you've got NetMeeting you can share up your text editor / browser and be shure you're both looking at exactly the same thing.
Although not "essential", I use Messenger to video-conference with friends, and especially my family (I bought both my parents and sister a Quick Cam before they moved 2000 miles away so we could still see each other!). Although yes, the phone still works, it's unfair that I have to go a week without being able to see my family, as well as pay long distance charges...
Instead of "HailStorm", Microsoft should be forced to rename their service to "LightDrizzle", to avoid false metaphorical advertising about the degree of adverse conditions that the system will likely be able to withstand.
Look, would you use Hotmail to handle your business's mail? So why would you use MSN, Yahoo, etc. to deal with your business's IM needs? And yes, IM is becoming like email and the phone- another tool that people are relying on more and more to share information.
So, if you care about IM for business use, why wouldn't you just pay for it? I only know of Sametime (which is good for inside your organization and connects via AIM externally). This is a tool for businesses and not for casual users.
But someone should listen up here and make a business out of this for people who want a reliable IM service for casual use.
I would think that there are people out there who would pay something for guaranteed reliability.
I ask this because if it is only the need for a browser that is keeping you on Windows (and I am not naive enough to think this is the only reason, I am sure there are others, but hear me out), then go ahead and switch now.
Pick a good distro (I personally use SuSE - currently on 6.3, but moving to 7.2 soon - Mandrake seems cool - but I haven't tried it) - or, choose a BSD or something. Install it, then set up Netscape 4.72.
This is anecdotal - but I have used 4.72 for a long while, and while it does have its faults - ie, it will crash, forcing you to do a "kill" to stop it - plus the annoying address book bug - it works pretty well. Mozilla is almost there - jump ship from Windows now, if you are that "tempted" - get familiar right now with everything. Once Mozilla is there (and I have to admit, it is so damn close - I am tempted to give it a shot as it is now), go for it.
Whatever else is holding you back, there are alternatives and replacements. Good luck!
Worldcom - Generation Duh!
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
I remember hearing something on TV that there was some corruption caused by the disk controllers, which corrupted their primary and backup drives. While that seems possible (and rare), it's more fun to assume it's due to poor OS development/stability ;)
carpet bombing can be fun! Else, we wouldn't have this disk to play with: http://nuintari.net/images/aol60cd.png
--Nuintari
slashdot : where an opinion can be wrong.
Actually, its a selling feature of Office XP collaberation potential.
----- LoboSoft specializes in Digital Language Lab
Yet this entire mess (the IM failure) has occured on a completely distributed network as well. Micrsofts explanation citing "odd hardware failures" demonstrates that the distributed nature of their network is in fact, nothing more then an illusion. While hardware failures are a reality within this industry, to see a distributed network brought down to its knees illustrates the existance of a single point of failure.
You take for granted precisely that which is the point of concern. Can Hailstorm and
It's called a licence agreement. Read their current ones and you'll see how far a lawsuit for damages would go.
That's the whole issue...at what point is a license agreement just a joke? Maybe it's mildly valid for a copy of photoshop or something similar..
But my bank's website doesn't make me agree that occasionally a bill payment won't go through. If you went to a real bank and had to sign a license agreement saying "just in case one of our bank tellers is drunk, we accept no responsibility for lost or misplaced payments" you'd laugh and find a new bank.
It really is quite simple. Anyone who puts their important data in one place, at the mercy of one system, with one login service is putting all their eggs in one basket. It provides a single point of failure that would be unacceptable to any corporate user. So why would private users fall for it?
.Net if you like, but make sure you have a contingency plan. Just like if you are a one-car family, you better make sure you have an alternative method of getting to work if it dies one morn.
.Net or Passport are down?
Use Passport and
With most utilities, if they fail, you can sue for damages. E.g., if my electricity provider has an outage that lets my freezer defrost and ruins my food, I can get damages to repalce the spoiled food. How will MS deal with users who end up paying extra interest because they couldn't complete bank payments on time because
There's always risk of data loss. But what I can't understand is why a billion dollar company didn't have anyone install some backup tapes for them? 7 days outage and loss of data? What, did the outage also go thru the backup tapes and delete them? How can this be possible? Does anyone have experience who can explain to me why backups can fail so badly?
---
As a (curious) sysadmin I wouldn't mind reading a post mortem like what the /. crew did a few weeks ago. I think MS is missing out on a lot of brownie points by not publishing a blow by blow summary of how an enterprise goes about troubleshooting/fixing a system like that. It would be possible to do something like that w/o disclosing sensitive information. Like I said, wishfull thinking.
... unless they are bullshitting *cough*Marketing*cough* the whole thing. Never underestimate Microsoft - you do so at your own peril.
----- rL
>The average joe is usually atleast 2-3 years behind the curve technologicly, while businesses are much closer.
Except when companies like Dell, Compaq, and HP force it upon new customers. How long after WinME came out did the big 3 start shipping it? The same day, I'd wager. People will use whatever comes on their computers, and it's the bottom line, sad as it is.
Check out my sysadmin blog!
I've been considering deploying Jabber for our internal IM needs, but Jabber.Com is not really interested in small (under 50K seat) deployments, and the open source server has no support and does not scale.
Any company that uses an external vendor to provide business-critical internal communications, be they e-mail, IM, or even in-house phone calls, is making a huge mistake.
Using MSN-Messenger for business IM is no better than using Hotmail for business email.
I do not deploy Linux. Ever.
mind you I'm sure everything will get worked out
I'm surprised at all of you!
Based on Microsoft's development model for previous products, such as Win and WinNT, you can reliably predict that "the application" will suck badly until finally it has acquired version 3. status.
Sheesh, it isn't like this is rocket science!
"Provided by the management for your protection."
.Net is not an internet service (even if they are trying to hype it as such). It is a set of development tools coupled with a runtime environment, much like the Java Virtual Machine. The reason they are hyping it in combination with the internet is because it has some very cool features that will allow easier web-development/interaction/administration. It isn't something that can go down, anymore than gcc can go down. Just because it sounds like its an internet service, doesn't mean it is. When will you get it?
Actually I'm a big fan of Yahoo! messenger myself. Sometimes I'll use AIM, but its obviously aimed (no pun intended) at teenagers, and tends to be very simplified. ICQ has a bunch of cryptic things in it that I'll never ever use.
Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas I'll never know.
If the first statement is false, then the only thing I can think of is that the system was infected by either an outside source, or some other malicious virus.
Oh dear... Do you think Microsoft was infected by the GPL?
But things have changed drastically now and expectations are higher. As services get more refined, more elaborate, and more reliable, the times when they are unavailable become all the more unacceptable.
Horrible example (i.e. I'm tired): There were no doubt times 50 years ago when roads and bridges would get flooded out, preventing you from getting where you wanted to go (by car...even by foot or horse) until it was fixed or the river level went down or what have you. Now, everyone (in the U.S.) expects to be able to drive to any public place at any time of day and at worst have to deal with a traffic jam or a short detour. Not being able to reach reasonable destinations is unthinkable, and would make the local news, if not the national news (for a large enough "outage").
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
Of course, after this, maybe MS is realizing they don't exert 100% control over their own service. :^)
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
An outage of their IM service makes you wonder? 'Cmon ... they've hosed things way worse than this before.
If this is based on the same concepts of hailstorm, then potential customers may have some concerns...
;)
...mind you I'm sure everything will get worked out - throw money at a problem, and they tend to get solved - I'm sure in the end it'll come out that it was script kiddies hacking the MSN messenger network...
BlackNova Traders
Well there's no way I'm gonna upgrade my users to WindowsXP after everything that is going around, and I bet I am not the only network administrator here that won't make the move.
:) ) well they'll change their aiming.
Let's start from top: It's a messaging program, Hell ICQ grew super dooper fast in a year, and I never seen it down more than an hour or two maximum since 4 years, Server crashes can happen to the very best of us, so anyone bitching at any company going down a few hours probably doesn't know what's involved.
BUT...
I look at a company in the server buisness, trying to take over the world, trying to squash it's competitors in every area, of course their database must be growing at a phenomenal rate, of course nothing is perfect and it can crash, but the point is, *1* Week?? how many of you people would get their balls chopped if you'd kill your mail server for more than a few hours?
That's what I find unacceptable, I love windows 2000, more than any unix flavor, but what I hate is microsoft doing something good for once, and now that they have a good codebase and something that works, they add up piles of shit only a monopoly could do, and the more useless remote control they put, the more load they get, the more things like this are bound to happen.
Now it's just a chat/messaging program, most of the MSN users run ICQ in parallel, but if one day its a Microsoft world and other more important things relies on such a system (.NET?) and the same thing happens, just imagine the consequences.
Your word license has expired and you *NEED* to make that document but you can't reset your license by the net, great, more pain in the ass, phone them to get a code, since the server is down, their lines are probably full... etc etc...
That's why I won't support windowsXP, it might be a nice product, but if people aren't sheep and realize what's happening, it'll send a message to microsoft (and they do listen, especially if the sales aren't strong and users are complaning (the 1st rather than the 2nd
Too bad there's no solid simple and user friendly alternative because in a few months from now there will be a really nice opening and pissed off users (just wait with all that SID key and licensing activation junk).
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
It's great that MS "apologizes for the inconvenience" but I wonder at what point does it stop being an inconvenience and starts to be real damage.
Voice over, calm, almost Hal-like: The computer does not care. It sits quietly in the room, all alone, for days at a time.
Now, it truely does work well with others. Microsoft.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
But thats about the only justifiable excuse I can think of for losing data! :)
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
This is why not to put too much faith in one vendor
This incident went completely unsupported. Not that any support would really make a difference since obviously it was a bad problem (maybe they're trying to save face?). At least we should know what is going on, tho.
----
Shear speculation, but it has a ring of truth somehow.
;-)
Check out the Vinny the Vampire comic strip
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
Pffft. Doubtfully. Most people would probably spend most of their day hitting "Reload" to see if it's finally up yet.
To get something done, a committee should consist of no more than three persons, two of them absent.
I don't quite buy the 100%. But very, very close to 100% is achievable. Even if you set up everything perfectly and you do have regular dumps and you do keep them off site and you adhere to each and every best practice for a system- or database admin, things can go wrong beyond your control. For example, blown hardware, corrupting both mirrors of a disk, really dumb application bugs, corrupting the database logically over time, whatever.
It's a matter of checks and balances and cost, of course. It is however very hard to achieve virtually guaranteed recoverability up to the last running transactions. For 20% of the cost however, you can achieve recoverability up to (say) a couple of hours worth of transactions. Depending on the type of data this might be quite perfect for your requirements.
For example: /. has quite different data recoverability requirements then the SWIFT (the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication) network. While a days loss of /. will disgruntle a couple hundred people, 20 minutes worth of lost SWIFT message can provoke an international financial crisis.
I wouldn't think that Micro$oft is obliged to secure the server park and data of a free service as rigourous as the Federal Reserve has to secure its competers.
You are completely correct however, that $$$s overall behavior, especially in context of other service failures, lost customer data, a weeks loss of service and an information policy, compared to which your average NSA spook is as talkative as a drinking buddy in a pub after half a bottle of Tequilla is utterly unacceptable.
No sir, I wouldn't trust such amateurs with my personal data, let alone with confidential, or even company critical data; TYWM
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Blockquoth Traicovn:
True, but you also take the risk if you handle your own data. Most people don't make backups, and far too many of those who do have never tested them. What good is it to make a backup if you can't use it to recover from a disaster?
Microsoft's data loss in this case is inexcuseable, and reason enough why anybody considering a move to Microsoft-hosted services for anything of any importance should instead run screaming to the hills.
But! Most people would still be taking less of a risk of data loss by trusting their data to Microsoft than taking care of it themselves.
The answer is to control your own data only if you have the expertise and equipment to do so. If you don't, then hire somebody who does.
Microsoft has, yet again, demonstrated that they don't.
b&
All but God can prove this sentence true.
The entries in HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\MessengerServ ice\ListCache\MSN Messenger Service are mostly of the form Allownn , Contactnn , Reversenn and a few other entries (including a rather ominous MsgPrivacy entry (with a value of 00 00 00 00 on my machine :-))).
The problem is, contact info for every messenger login made by that Windows username seems to be stored over here. While much of the data is obscured (or seems to be (haven't checked yet)), the email address of each contact is stored in the clear .
Interesting thing to remember the next time you use MSN Messenger at a public computer, or on someone else's machine -- your contact list may just have become public knowledge.
Is this a known issue, by any chance? Can anyone else comment on this? I've checked this out on MSN Messenger 3.6.0025.
____________________________
2*b || !(2*b) is a tautology
MSN Messenger service has been restored to all our worldwide customers. We sincerely regret the inconvenience you may have experienced. While the system has been fully restored, some users may experience delays for log-ins and authentications. We are working to resolve these issues now.
And later in the _same_ release:
Finally, while the system has been fully restored some users may experience delays for log-ins and authentications. We are working to resolve these issues.
Are they just being redundant from carelessness, or are there still so many people having problems that they want them to think that they are one of a few?
And a little more forboding, this is from the MSN article (kinda sounds like even they are criticizing MS):
Still, the MSN Messenger outage leaves questions unanswered. Many people reported a string of secondary problems, such as the inability to access Hotmail accounts, lost MSN Calendar data, or the inability to download software from Microsoft's Microsoft Developer Network Web site. All share one common thread: Passport authentication.
Other stories about Passport on /.
science is a religion
The transports that allow you to use AIM/MSN/ICQ defeat the purpose of using Jabber. Those services still have to be accessed the usual way, so if MSN goes down then it goes down for everybody. Transports are useful though, as they allow you to talk to people who haven't switched to Jabber yet.
ICQ's features and "user float" are client-specific. The trouble with Jabber clients is that most of them are not that developed. There is no reason they couldn't have these features in the future. I'm a big fan of the ICQ interface though, so I actually started developing a client myself, called Psi. I hope one day it can replace Licq.
Get it at Jabbercentral.com
Any business that heavily relies on IM should take a look at Jabber. Just look at the benefits:
In the Jabber world, a mass outage would never occur unless there was a problem with the Internet. With Jabber, if your server goes down then that doesn't affect the rest of us (just like if your mailserver went down).
Businesses should especially like this, because they can run their own company server, leaving them with nothing to worry about but their own network. And of course, unlike deploying a local ICQ server, and local Jabber server can talk with the rest of the world since Jabber is _supposed_ to operate decentralized like that.
No need to worry about a corrupt central corporation sniffing your conversations. No need to worry about a server going down that's not under your control. No proprietary protocols either, as Jabber's protocol is fully opened (see docs.jabber.org). Want to add new features? No problem. With its clean XML design, adding new tags is a breeze and won't break existing clients.
Also handy is you have control of the contact lists at the server. If someone gets hired into the business, the Jabber admin guy can just add the new person to everybody's list with some script. No need for all the employees to have to go through the add/authorization process with fellow workers.
Jabber is clearly the future of IM, for both business and home users (I envision a world where each ISP runs a Jabber server alongside the usual Mail servers). I just hope it gets widely adopted. People tend to use whatever MS hands them, and I dread that WinXP / MSN may have the majority of the world doing their IM through Microsoft and their central server. This is so clearly backwards when compared to any other core Internet system (WWW,Email,News).
Everyone should get involved with Jabber. Head over to jabbercentral.com and grab yourself a client. Advocate. Pitch in. Cross your fingers.
-Justin
It would make sense to store a backup copy of your contact list locally, but keeping the master list on the server side is the best way to go for applications like this, because people sign into Messenger from so many different locations (home, work, on the road, etc) and in order for them to access their buddy list it needs to be server side.
Up until a year or maybe two ago, AOL Instant Messenger stored buddy lists completely on the client side, and needless to say this was very annoying when setting up on a new machine. Sure you could export/import buddy lists from one to the other, but if you forgot to do that you're pretty much out of luck.
I do agree, though, that a quick backup in the registry, or better yet a data file in the Messenger folder, would be a nice feature in case of situations like this.
Conversely, here in Kansas City, AT&T's dial-up service had a month or two period with a horrible connection record. Speed, busy signals, etc. They promised to upgrade the system, but people quit before they could. Now, it is probably the fastest ISP in the area (always full connection speed, 200ms latency consistently, 6kb/s downstream often). Odds are that this has quite a bit to do with everyone quiting before they upgraded the network. Luckily we were too lazy to get our ISP changed, so now we reap the benefits of an underused system.
Anne Tomlinson went to work for Microsoft?
Must be time to check again on what the definition of "is" is.
-joseph
Well you could always transfer to a different registrar. There are several around willing to renew your domain for a low low price. www.godaddy.com will do it for around $8.95
Just don't wait till the last minute to do this. No later than 3 or 4 months before your reg is up, initiate a transfer. I would also be sure you don't need to do any modifications on your account after the transfer has been initiated.
Now perhaps people will see that micrsoft isn't the best, bigest and greatest that is out there and will use something else. Or maybe even look into using other applications for their operating system and business application needs. There will be a revolution from the dictatorship that is microsoft and alternative software will come into the foreground and everyone will rejoice and the cheaper price and more functunality that is offered.
however most people will just keep using what they use now becase everyone thinks that change is bad.
"The secret of success is to know something nobody else knows." -Aristotle Onassis
I suppose there's always next time. Now to wade thru' the (currently) 319 comments...
--
"I'm not downloaded, I'm just loaded and down"
HKEY_USERS\(SID)\Software\Microsoft\Messenger Servi ce\ListCache\MSN Messenger Service
All your contacts are there. Can Messenger restore from that list? Who knows. I am wondering how bad the client code got screwed up when they were doing the daily releases to keep it connecting with AOL a few years ago.
'Same speed C but faster'
Most Common Support Questions
1-How can I get connected to the messaging service?
2-How can I uninstall the product?
Funny....
Make It Secret . Free JavaScript implementation of AES for your browser
I think the reason this is so big is simply due to the fundamental difference between appearence and reality. Maybe in reality (and maybe not) this really was just a hardware problem which will never occur again. But the appearence of the situation is that M$ can't handle something as simple as keeping a messenger service working, so they'll never be able to keep something like .net working.
I would also like to add that the service issue raised because of this is an important one: we all know that services will fail at one point or another, but a responsible company needs to alert its users.
If it's supposed to move and doesn't, use WD-40. If it moves and it shouldn't, use duct tape.
The story is on ZDNet, not CNet (even though I think CNet owns ZDNet nowadays).
And that "story on MSNBC" is a ZDNet story that was republished by MSNBC--not a story written by MSNBC.
you're right, software can be no more stable than the hardware on which it's running.
.NET
the big difference imho is that slashdot does not advocate and stand to benefit from it's own brand of centralized web services. it's been said much more eloquently by other posters, but if passport or windows product activation went on the fritz, the results could be significant.
this might be a sign that microsoft is not ready to offer web services a la
A: None. The Universe spins the bulb, and the Zen master merely stays out of the way.
Yes, it was Rousseau's Social Contract, and the paraphrase is wrong. Its everyone gives up individual rights, and in return gains every one of those rights back from the community, but as community rights. In a nutshell I = You = We and hurting you hurts me, because we're all members of the community. It also has to do with the General Will, which is the notion that we all agree on the same society/community and so we all have the same will for the society community. Very GNU like, actually. But of course no one will see this post cuase its nested deep and a reply to a reply :)
Im a web programmer, 9 of my friends are web programmers. We used to work at the same company, but now we are working for 10 different companies. We all use ICQ, and we ask each other questions concerning problems we are having with code, or we toss ideas back and forth reguarding the projects we are working on.
do we goof off on it? yup, but it is also an essential tool for all of us
_______________________
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
True, although I believe Joe SixPack will indeed use it, or at least Mrs. SixPack will.
How many businesses do you know that haven't deployed any MS products?
How many do you know that haven't followed the upgrade curve for MS?
It is like no one ever getting fired for buying IBM. These days, IT doesn't get fired for using MS.
Not that I approve. I'm just being realistic.
"Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life." -- Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, Book 9, 37
These people have looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined.
I see comments about the average joe using .NET regardless. MS should be more worried about businesses and whether they see this is a potential problem.
The average joe is usually atleast 2-3 years behind the curve technologicly, while businesses are much closer. For Microsoft's bottom line they need companies to move to this as soon as it's available. Large business purchasing drive their revenue not Joe Schmo and his 9x box.
You can already see them positioning themselves to force everyone that way. If John Q. Admin looks at MS and sees nothing but problems and service outages they will either postpone moving towards .NET until it's "stable" or look to move to different platforms.
I'm not drunk, I just have a speech impediment. And a stomach virus. And an inner ear infection.
we still don't know the real story
Sometimes, news is news.
> From what I've read, they had a disk controller failure, and the secondary (ie. backup) controller also had some kind of fault which lead them "further down the disaster recovery plan." Which means now they go to tape backups, probably.
.net with this kind of high-profile outage on everyone's minds? If you're the CIO of a big company and you move your company to .net, do you just send all your employees home for a week when something like this happens?
Sounds like they're just making excuses. No matter how they spin it, there's no excuse for a disk controller to put them out of service for a week. Lose data since the last backup, sure, but not a week long shutdown.
Recall also that Hotmail suffered 10+ days outage for a subset of their users last summer, and some of those users permanently lost their data and had to just start new accounts.
I agree with Pinball Wizard: there's no excuse for this kind of thing. (Frankly, I think it's because Microsoft still doesn't 'get' anything beyond a single-user system.)
FWIW, they've been saying the same thing over at c.o.l.a. for a few days, and even one of the tenured trolls is agreeing that it's inexcusable.
And how are they going to sell
--
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
The CNet article seems to have someone from Microsoft hinting it was a hardware failure..
What Happened? did all three CTRL-ALT and DEL keys fall off at the same time?
Enquiring minds want to know, cos if you talk to Cisco, HP, et al.. they'll sell you something called a 'Maintenance Contract'.
EZ
"Oops, I always forget the purpose of competition is to divide people into winners and losers." - Hobbes
Not 7 days. And, they published an entire blow-by-blow timeline of what happened.
So, who's more responsible?
-- You can't idiot-proof anything, because they're always coming out with better idiots.
"This outage is not indicative of Microsoft's ability to move forward with its .Net strategy," Visse said. "This was one isolated issue brought on by a series of extremely rare hardware failures."
I find this highly improbable. Any ISP worth it's service has either service contracts on it's hardware, or a closet of "critical spares" (hardware that the ISP couldn't function without, and therefore keeps a second piece or the parts to repair equipment), usually both.
A company the size of MS, this should be a foregone conclusion that both of these things should already have been covered. I know that the Messenger Service isn't quite as mission-critical as say a primary filesever, nor is the messenger service as important as many other ISP services (web, mail, authentication, etc), but come on! Hardware failure isn't an excuse for a mutiple *workday* outage. Not for a company the size of MS.
EveryDNS. Use it. It works.
AC's need not reply
I think the notes to be examined here are the lack of PR and customer support on the issue and the extended length of time of the outage. You can bet that the issue is being examined very closely by MS and will not happen the same in the future. I guess what I'm saying is that yelling and pointing doesn't fix anything and that the same could happen to you so learn from the down side of the whole thing.
Availability is a very hard problem to solve for any service. I think MSN did well to keep as many people connected as they did (I for instance did not lose service).
Unfortunately this, like the ./ outage, was a hardware issue and things that should have worked (and probably worked hundreds of times when tested) did not work.
"You can now flame me, I am full of love,"
And, of course, it too lasted 7 days, without so much as a report on it, and wiped out user data....
Seriously, there's no comparison.
And I agree with the header - this really does make you question how much to trust their plans to make everything need to authenticate remotely.
-= rei =-
"This may be presumptuous..." "That's my favorite kind of 'This'."
Through HailStorm, Microsoft hopes to deliver e-commerce services, address books online, and password management to disparate devices such as PCs, handhelds or cell phones.
"No, your PC won't be useable 'till next week. We're sorry about that. No, you can't use your cell phone either. We have a minor I/O problem."
>It's such a nice, comforting feeling knowing everything is taken care of, and in good hands. The future's bright. Where do you want to go today?>
OK, it could happen to any negligent sysadmin (uhm, count me in). I don't have any problem with the way Microsoft runs its business (OK, maybe I do, on moral grounds). What I do have a problem with, is any kind of centralized information center. Data cannot be stored safely on one location, one system, prone to failure. I'm sure even a complete idiot would NOT have overseen this. And please, let's not even think about the consequences of one company keeping records of 98% of the desktop users. Fortunately, we do have a choice. Would be a shame to waste, considering the alternative.
I admit, my opninion is biased. So is yours.
No need to fear, by the time .NET is up all of Microsoft's servers will be running FreeBSD..
So, there ARE legitimate, work-related uses for instant messanger software. =)
---
I realize I'm just a lowly mathematician and all, but doesn't this seem reasonable, even for people that design real-life applications?
Curmudgeon Gamer: Not happy
lasts seven days with no valid explanation really starts to make you think about .Net
.NET services were distributed to many 'equal' computers (think the internet as it is structured today) than we can withstand the loss of one machine, in the M$ vision of the future many-many-many services and machines rely on their .NET systems. Imagine if TCP/IP had to 'ping' authorize.big-toll-gate.com's 'license' server in order to start - now imagine they go down....
/.; but what happens when Passport crashes for a week and no one is able to pay bills or maybe Office.NET file storage site burns down and takes millions of people's family photos (yes I know about off-site backups).
.NET has serious potential for peril. I hope all the PHBs and DoJ are paying attention...
At least it is not my families 7 years of financial data, or the copies of my child's baby-pictures - or my presentation that I needed for a job-interview. We dont have to tell MS that distributed resources increases fault tolerance. When you devise a massive system, with a single point of failure (M$.Net) you are going to burn - and burn big-time. If
This may not be a surprise to any one on
The point is simple - you cannot build a reliable system with such a glaring single-point-of-failure. Downtime happens - and as this MSMessenger event shows us -
I think the real cause was something like...
Error:
MsgrSvr.exe caused an invalid page fault in module KERNEL32.DLL at 015f:bff9dba7.
--
All opinions presented here aren't mine.
This crowd? Nah - we all wrote scripts that sent us email alerts to our cellphones when slashdot came back up and we could finally find 'CowboyNeal' somewhere in the HTML source :)
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
No, it is virtually allways used for leisure: Pretending to do work whilst actually swapping sweet-little-nothings with Jane in accounts, or arranging a Q3 duel with DukeQuakem. (if someone actually has an important, legit reason for using a messenger service, please correct me...).
Basically, if you cant us MSN messenger, you can us email, or pick up the phone. I'm sure, when MSN messenger breaks down, its not on MS top list of priorites.
Perhaps, er, they had better things to do? Or perhaps it got lost at the bottom of someones in-draw?
However, it probably wasn't a good idea for MS to leave it so long. So many bloody people use it, that it does send out a helluvalot of bad publicity (I'm not going to get that date with Jane this weekend and it is ALL Micro$ofts fault!! Bah!). However, I think if a important component of .NET where to fail, and adversely affect many critical services, MS might react a little quicker, with greater resources & assurance
See this report from The Register for the grisly details.
I suppose you could say this is because VeriSign and Network Solutions are insane, deranged companies, and there is most likely truth to this. But I'm not convinced; I HAVE TO deal with these idiots for my domain names, and now I have to rely on .NET to do it. Ick.
D
----
Ya know there are two possible causes from the minute information they've released (It was caused by a freak failure when a hard disk controler crashed).
1) Caused by a freak failure when a hard disk controler crashed.
2) They've said they have to restore from backups.
If both are true, then it sounds like they were using a distributed database (or filesystem?) and one machine going down very badly managed to infect lots of others... doesn't bode well, especially when MS's solution to competing in the Server environment is traditionally to Cluster lots of machines together. The more you have the more chance one may have problems.
If the first statement is false, then the only thing I can think of is that the system was infected by either an outside source, or some other malicious virus. Standard Operating Procedure in this case would be to disconnect the machines, diagnose the problem (so new machines wouldn't be infected), and then restore from backup. Its also possible someone over-reacted and they went into this mode when in actuallity Item 1 was true.
Anybody else think we're hearing the whole story?
This space for rent. All reasonable inquiries will be entertained at proprietors discretion.
when these kind of outages happen, of Peter Deutsch's 8 Fallacies of Distributed Computing:
This is, of course, why the idea of remote authentication being necessary to use your word processor is a bad thing. Heck, even losing something as innocuous as an instant messaging program brought thousands of people to a screeching halt for a week. It seems to me that Microsoft (although they're certainly not the only ones) seem to believe these 8 fallacies blindly, espcially 1, 4, and (they're hoping) 6.
Right...
I am utterly amazed at times the things I hear about how system administration is performed at MS. Ever check their jobs page? They're really picky about who they hire, you know.
Yet we repeatedly hear about security problems with their own servers, how all their DNS servers were on the same network segment, hotmail goes down and now this? Lost data??!!!
I'm sorry, but as a former full-time sysadmin, there is absolutely no excuse for losing data. Preserving your companies data is the #1 priority of any sysadmin, regardless of the company. And preserving data with 100% certainty is acheivable by anyone who takes the time to set things up right.
Oh well, I was never a fan of their passport/hailstorm idea anyway. Things like this can only cause more people to run away from using those services.
No, Thursday's out. How about never - is never good for you?
Bet they know how I feel at work every day now...
-- Geof F. Morris
Think about Hobbes social contract.
.NET. It is the companies responsibility to give us fair service, and tell us what's going on.
.NET and using all of the authorization features to access Microsoft's sites that require Passport/Messenger, just like in Hobbes social contract you are giving up some rights and some control. Your taking a risk. But remember, their are other choices.
'People give up certain rights and freedoms for a feeling of safety etc.'
This is the same sort of situation kinda. People give up having their own servers for communications and data storage in technologies like
If we do not like what's going on, it is our right and responsibility to seek alternatives.
Your always going to risk loss of data and loss of service if you let someone else handle your data, communications, authorization, etc. It's a risk that you take. You hope that the company is able to do a good job and maintain good service. Remember, if you start using
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
[Something witty and intelligent should have appeared here.]
{Traicovn}
As a (curious) sysadmin I wouldn't mind reading a post mortem like what the /. crew did a few weeks ago. I think MS is missing out on a lot of brownie points by not publishing a blow by blow summary of how an enterprise goes about troubleshooting/fixing a system like that. It would be possible to do something like that w/o disclosing sensitive information. Like I said, wishfull thinking.
BOSTON SUCKS!
Recent surveys show that employees that use Microsoft's popular Instant Messenger software are having one of the most productive weeks in recent years.
Now if only Slashdot would have a week-long outage, I could get some work done.
We sent out an instant message to all the users letting them know about the outage.
Remember when users couldn't get through because there were busy signals all the time?
Remember how people said that there was going to be a mass exodus from AOL?
Remember how that didn't happen?
No matter how badly MS screws this incident up, no matter how many judgements get made against them, the average business drone and Joe User will still end up using .NET.
"Enough of this wretched, whining monkey life." -- Marcus Aurelius, _Meditations_, Book 9, 37