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Power Outage Takes Wikimedia Down

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the problem-with-non-absolute-power dept.

Baricom writes "Just a few weeks after a major power outage took out well-known blogging service LiveJournal for several hours, almost all of Wikimedia Foundation's services are offline due to a tripped circuit breaker at a different colo. Among other services, Wikimedia runs the well-known Wikipedia open encyclopedia. Coincidentally, the foundation is in the middle of a fundraising drive to pay for new servers. They have established an off-site backup of the fundraising page here until power returns."

3 of 577 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Coincidence... ;) by daveo0331 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    On the other hand, subjecting the donation page to the Slashdot effect seems like a great way to reach the fundraising goal in no time. Assuming of course the page itself stays up.

    Seriously though, if you like wikipedia, consider donating, even if it's just 5 bucks. I think it's even tax deductible if you itemize.

    --
    Remember the days when Republicans were the party of fiscal responsibility?
  2. Re:mysql bad at disaster recovery? by ctr2sprt · · Score: 5, Interesting
    We have a similar problem at work. There we don't endure database corruption, we just get broken replication. It appears to be working, but it actually isn't. So we have to take the master offline (actually just acquire a write lock on the DB, it can still answer SELECTs), tar up its (massive) database, scp it to the slaves, start the master, stop the slaves, untar the database, restart the slaves, and restart replication. The entire process can take several hours and it's easy to make mistakes. We put stickers on our MySQL servers saying "DO NOT REBOOT WITHOUT CONTACTING OPS MANAGEMENT," though unfortunately faulty DIMMs are illiterate.

    I don't know if PostgreSQL has similar problems, but I very much doubt that Oracle or DB2 do. I know that improved failover support has been a target of the PSQL developers for a little while now, so while it may not be on par with Oracle and DB2 it's probably closer than MySQL. At least for now.

    I wish this had prompted management to consider alternatives to MySQL, at least for our mission-critical database servers, but unfortunately it hasn't. They don't even see that we could sell an enterprise-level RDBMS as a significant feature - we're a webhosting company - and charge through the nose for it. Oh well. They don't listen to peons like me, they just make me fix MySQL replication every two weeks.

  3. Re:Another indictment of MySql by ergo98 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    No database can guarantee data integrity in the case of a power failure.

    Barring a couple of extreme exceptions, of course a modern database system should protect integrity in the case of a power failure, or any other sudden system failure (kernel panic, GPF, whatever). In the case of the much maligned SQL Server, you can hit the power button all you want mid-transaction and you're going to get a blister on your finger before the database is corrupted.