Ma.gnolia User Data Is Gone For Good

miller60 writes "The social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia reports that all its user data was irretrievably lost in the Jan. 30 database crash that knocked the service offline. Ma.gnolia founder Larry Halff recently discussed the crash and the lessons to be learned from Ma.gnolia's experience. A lesson for users: don't assume online services have lots of staff and servers, and always keep backup copies of your data. Ma.gnolia was a one-man operation running on two Mac OS X servers and four Mac minis."

Comments

Re:Mac reliability

[BJZQ8]

http://www.apple.com/xserve/

Transcript of interview

[Chalex]

Rather than watch the video or download the 23MB MP3, you can read the full transcript here:

http://ratafia.info/post/78915439/transcript-and-commentary-for-whither-magnolia

I can read much faster than I can listen.

Re:Mac reliability

[Blakey Rat]

Yeah, but that's exactly the surprising part. Why would you pay Apple $3000 for a xserve running Apache and MySQL, with a crappy service contract (no next-day service, no on-site service-- I've looked into it), when you could buy an equivalent Dell server for $2100, running the exact same Apache and MySQL, and get a next-day and on-site service contract?

Anyone who buys an xserve is an idiot.

Re:Mac reliability

[Blakey Rat]

Fine; what company do you trust? HP? IBM? Replace "Dell" with them, and my example still applies. The fact is, *every* server vendor can do better than Apple. Even IBM does better, and they suck.

Oh, and BTW, all servers will have hardware problems from time-to-time. When that happens with your Dell, HP, IBM server, the guy is there in his truck in 4 hours. When that happens to your Apple server, you're SOL.

!equivalent

[WiseWeasel]

Mac OS X Server runs a host of services, particularly for managing Mac OS X clients, that you won't find on any other OS, so there are reasons to get a Xserve in particular; web serving just is not one of them.

Re:Mac reliability

[DittoBox]

Except its the same hardware...well no, that's not true. You can get a Dell with actual hardware RAID when you're stuck with software RAID on an Xserve.

Furthermore Dell also has a 4-hour onsite 24/7 support package if I'm not mistaken.

I love my MacBook and the OS X desktop experience but you simply can't use an Xserve on business critical operations.

Re:Mac reliability

[Anonymous Coward]

But that's more of a PR thing than anything. If I raise cows in the pasture behind my hose then they aren't "USDA Certified Organic" or any other such thing, but that doesn't really change what they are - it just means the haven't been inspected an labeled by some committee.

Same with Mac OS X being "Unix". It's more of a stamp of approval than anything.

Re:Mac reliability

[blhack]

Even IBM does better, and they suck.

One morning I came in and was looking at the logs. SMART was reporting that one of the disks in one of the servers was going to go bad soon. Not 15 minutes after i even noticed this in the logs, an IBM tech was there with a fresh one ready to replace it.

How? The server called home, told IBM about the error, and they disbatched a tech immediately.

If that "sucks", your service must come with free hookers or something.

Re:Mac reliability

[ThrowAwaySociety]

a crappy service contract (no next-day service, no on-site service-- I've looked into it)

Not very hard, apparently.
http://www.apple.com/server/support/

You get 24/7 telephone and email support with 30-minute response. For hardware repairs, Apple-certified technicians provide onsite response within four hours during business hours and next-day onsite response when you contact Apple after business hours.

Re:Mac reliability

[nxtw]

1. OS X is certified Unix. I don't care if you disagree. You can disagree with gravity too if you want, but it will still keep your feet on the ground.

This is meaningless today. Most Unixlike systems today are not certified Unix systems.
OS X has some significant differences from traditional Unixlike systems and Linux - not necessarily disadvantages:

• OS X has a Mach-based microkernel (XNU) and a completely different driver model (I/O Kit)
• OS X's VM (virtual memory) system performs poorly, and swapping cannot be safely disabled. If you do disable swap, the OS acts poorly when it thinks it's run out of memory - it grinds to a halt. Linux by default will kill the process using the most memory if it runs out - this is configurable. Also, since Linux's VM system is configurable enough that you can control just how much is swapped and how much is cached, you can set Linux so that swap is only touched when it is really needed.
• OS X is huge - it's much larger than a minimal installation of a server Linux distribution. The GUI is not an optional component.

3. There is increased functionality above a "regular linux server". Take xgrid for instance. Many of the tasks it does it can do work only with mac software.

You can certainly add grid computing software to other operating systems. OS X is missing some functionality that a "regular linux server" may have. Even when considering third-party software, there are many things that can be done in Linux but not in OS X.

• OS X is somewhat lacking clustering ir high availability fatures. For example, a "regular linux server" running CentOS has DRBD, for distributed block devices, and GFS, a cluster file system. It doesn't have application failover of the type provided by Windows's built-in clustering or by Linux-HA; OS X only has IP failover.
• OS X has few server virtualization options - just Parallels. VMware ESX supports Windows, Linux, and Solaris. Commercial Xen distributions support Windows and Linux; paravirtualized versions of BSDs and OpenSolaris are available too. Solaris, FreeBSD, and addons to Linux provide effective kernel virtualization. Microsoft's Hyper-V runs Windows and can even run SUSE (and eventually RHEL.)
• OS X has no built-in or even officially supported iSCSI initiator. There is one free closed-source initiator, but commerical support is not offered - making it not very suitable for server use. Microsoft has a supported iSCSI initiator that works with Windows 2000 and up, and it's included in 2008 and Vista. iSCSI initiation is supported by many Linux distributions, including Red Hat and Suse.

Mac updates are not all or nothing. What in the world do you even mean by that? They have point updates, but so does linux. This doesn't mean they don't have updates for individual OS components too. There was a security update just the other day that wasn't "all or nothing."

Mac OS X security updates certainly are "all or nothing" - you have to install all of the patches included in the package or install none of them. Each package includes many fixes, and sometimes they break things. The updates are not available as individual pkacages. You cannot select which updates are applied to the system.

RHEL/CentOS has point releases, but there are plenty of individual package updates in between (to fix bugs, compatibility, and security issues.) Individual package updates are released when they are ready, not as part of a large security update bundle or a monthly schedule.

Re:Mac reliability

[drinkypoo]

It means you don't have to pay the performance penalty that netatalk has from resource fork handling since HFS+ is a native file system.

So if you're dealing with lots of small files with both forks, you're going to pay a penalty. What that says to me is that there are certain limited cases in which you might still need to use an Apple fileserver for performance, but in almost every real-world case where you actually have macs as clients, is it really an issue?