Slashdot Mirror
GitHub Back Online After Service Outage
The Next Web reports that GitHub — home to many open source projects — suffered (and quickly recovered from) a service outage this morning, starting around 14:00 UTC. Other than that the problem "appears to have been caused by its database server," the cause isn't clear.
We are seriously considering sponsoring github with a free platinum support and maintenance contract for the Linux cluster stack, i.e. DRBD, Heartbeat, Pacemaker, Corosync.
Would that help?
But describing 14:00 as morning is a bit too much.
Not soon after the US government announced it would distribute info via github, github suffers failures. Coincidence? You decide.
So, sure, I use github. But... it goes down for a couple of hours and SlashDot panics? This isn't news.
News for nerds, that used to mean something around here. I think this sits pretty squarely within that, even if it doesn't affect you at at all. Certainly better than much of the news on here that's been not even slightly nerd related.
No, this counts as news. It was definitely an "oh, sh!t" moment for many people, and requires an explanation. Only in hindsight is it known that the outage was temporary.
It's news. I've corporate partners who rely heavily on gitbub.com for access to their open source tools and even for their corporate git repositories, since they're more reliable than almost any in-house source code repository I've dealt with. This especially includes the hand-built, written by the CIO source control systems, that are surprisingly common in startups before they mature. I know companies whose automated software continuous build environments because of this, so it's certainly news.
For years, going back to the days when SourceForge (forgery of source code??) was closely associated with Slashdot, I have been nervous of centrally-located sites for massive numbers of projects. Yes, locate resources there as a robust distribution front end. But have an independent presence on the net as well.
Centralization of something that is otherwise as free-wheeling and independence minded as Open Source Software, just seems contradictory.
It was down on Thursday for a little while too - if the story were about a pattern, perhaps it would be noteworthy if not newsworthy.
But, hey, I appreciate big sites being down every once in a while. When my systems have better uptime than those that Amazon runs, it's at least an understandable point of reference for PHB's.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
Maybe it was just slow news day.
I've corporate partners who rely heavily on gitbub.com
gitbub is the best there is at what they do, but what they do best isn't very nice.
Isn't the benefit of git that you keep the repository on your local machine, not on a central server like svn? Can't a git project absorb a brief outage?
A client's very large company pays GitHub for commercial grade service. The outages of varying levels have been frequent and getting in the way of team development efforts. The outages have cost us days of work with many dozens of developers being stuck and unable to work.
Github is down constantly. Enough that if you use it full time for your dev work it will impact you several times a year. They need an ops person badly.
Actually, I've seen github down 4 times already this year when I needed it. And when it went down, there's just basic status that really says, "wait". The last time this happened for me, I waited 5min and gave up... but sure put be behind work half a day (there is such thing as work schedules and NON-work schedules).
With this high availability around us, I'm really considering going back to a local git or hg. I mean the whole reason for github is availability... for critical projects (I have a paid account). I know some will beg to differ, aka it's for social coding, but there's so many other ways to share code nowadays (e.g. googlecode).
I just use Git. You know, that DECENTRALIZED source control thing.... yeah, might want to think about using it in a decentralized way, since, well, you know? That's what it is? I mean, unless you mean that all of the systems you're writing code with are collectively less reliable. Seems like PEBKAC to me. Hell, you can comment out one line in a .git config file to enable a post-update hook, and you're pretty much done setting up an "in-house source code repository".
Put it this way: If any one part of your DISTRIBUTED source control goes down for a few hours, and that's a big deal.... Then you're a fucking idiot.
Put it this way: If any one part of your DISTRIBUTED source control goes down for a few hours, and that's a big deal.... Then you're a fucking idiot.
Or, truly ingenious. I have a paid up github account for work purpouses I wouldn't actually have any idea how to make a github outage become a big deal.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Lol. Hi idiot. Let me explain what decentralization means within the context of Git. It lets one person who has one cloned the repository upload it to a new host, and be ready to rock. Any of the other contributors can add it as a remote, then push their changes and you're good to go. This means they have an "in-house source code repository" times the amount of people who have ever contributed to the project.
However what Antique Geekmeister primarily described was the companies depending on Github for retrieving open source tools, which an in-house repository would not help with... Unless you mean to clone *all* of github? :)
Actually, I referred both to open source repos and to corporate sponsored, private repositories which are the _reference_ clones for other git users to update or clone from. this is particularly important for automatic build systems, which should only be _pulling_ changes form the common repository, never publishing changes to that reference repository.
git does not force this approach, you can switch to other repositories, but it is nonetheless extremely common and just how most people wind up using git.
> config file to enable a post-update hook, and you're pretty much done setting up an "in-house source code repository".
This kind of thing is _precisely_ why many developers,and many IT departments, don't get along well. For example, any developer can instlal sendmail: or Apache or a file server. Running a 24x7 critical high availability service with backup, account management, and user support is a larger task, and the IT department really has to think in those terms if they're skilled.
github has been a critical central repository for thousands of open source projects, hundreds of which I've had to work with in the last few years. Your personal home repository doesn't do me any good, nor will it collect and merge the changs from other developers.
You can still push/pull from a secondary remote if you like. Doesn't make a jot. If you don't trust github's reliability use github and your own solution.