Wikipedia Explains Today's Global Outage

gnujoshua writes "The Wikimedia Tech Blog has a post explaining why many users were unable to reach Wikimedia sites due to DNS resolution failure. The article states, 'Due to an overheating problem in our European data center many of our servers turned off to protect themselves. As this impacted all Wikipedia and other projects access from European users, we were forced to move all user traffic to our Florida cluster, for which we have a standard quick failover procedure in place, that changes our DNS entries. However, shortly after we did this failover switch, it turned out that this failover mechanism was now broken, causing the DNS resolution of Wikimedia sites to stop working globally. This problem was quickly resolved, but unfortunately it may take up to an hour before access is restored for everyone, due to caching effects."

Comments

DNA?

[MrTripps]

With DNA resolution problems, apple.com resolves to 64.38.232.180 (oranges.com).

Re:Do we accept this...

[jeffasselin]

Either you should read more or you have some serious linguistic credentials.

It's a reference to a quote in The Lord of the Rings by JRR Tolkien, something said to Frodo Baggins by Gildor Inglorion in The Fellowship of the Ring (tome 1) in chapter 3 "Three is Company":

"Do not meddle in the affairs of wizards, for they are subtle and quick to anger."

The quote is of course in reference to the wizards of Middle-Earth. The user sig which you tried to disparage is an attempt to make an analogy between sysadmins to wizards.

My problem here is that you weren't attacking the analogy, but the syntax of the sentence. A sentence crafted by JRR Tolkien, one of the most well-known scholars of the English language, and one who was named "Author of the Century" for the last century. I think he knew English syntax better than you do. Unless of course you're a well-known, published writer who has studied the English language extensively and you have the diplomas to prove it on the wall in your office.