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Hurricane Floyd Shuts Red Hat Down Temporarily
I've received notes from a few different places that Red Hat will
be taking down its onsite servers for the duration of the Hurricane
Floyd. The staff is leaving at 3 today and the place will be closed
on Thursday. If Floyd doesn't cause any serious problems the
web and ftp servers (as well as the *@redhat.com
email addresses) will come back up soon by friday. Update: 09/15 01:01 by CT : FTP and WWW are mirrored offsite, and assuming DNS propogates properly service
should continue without problems.
"Substantially all of our communications hardware and our other computer hardware operations related to our Web site are located in Herndon, Virginia. Fire, floods, HURRICANES, tornadoes, earthquakes, power loss, telecommunications failures, break-ins and similar events could damage these systems."
...
"Our insurance policies may not adequately compensate us for any losses that may occur due to failures or interruptions in our systems. WE DO NOT PRESENTLY HAVE ANY SECONDARY "OFF-SITE" SYSTEMS OR A FORMAL DISASTER RECOVERY PLAN."
RedHat SEC filing is he re. (page 13)
And yeah, verily did the prophets of RedHat predict that there would soon be a great wind in the upcoming year:
Red Hat Linux 5.0 (Hurricane) Login: _
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
people THINK that indutrialization is responsible, the fact is that the temperature of the earth varies quite significantly. There have been several large varriations of temperatures in the past century. There were many large storms in the 50-60, then it slowed down, and now its going back up. The coldest time recorded i believe was in the mid 1850's. The net difference since 1850 is several degrees, but i doubt its that significant compared to the last 10,000 years. It is possible that in 100 years there may be fear of global cooling (guess who the enviromentalists will blame that on).
The global warming is happening, however nobody has yet proven it is a result of industrialization, its just environmentalists have made you believe this.
We have to reduce pollution, but we shouldn't do it in a knee jurk reaction to "global warming" at the cost of many peoples jobs.
Ahh, an investment of time and effort now, could save them time and money later. I'm from Charleston, SC, and I've never seen a company move their computers to a safer place. I'm impressed that Red Hat is thinking ahead so well. I made good money after Hugo setting-up new machines. So many people leave their computers on the floor and/or near a window. The most serious preparation I've seen so far, is placing the computers on desks in case of flooding. Unfortunately, downtown Charleston is only 7 feet!! above sea level. I'm still sitting in my office in Charleston, and my company wasn't thoughtful enough to box up computers. Hell, they weren't even thoughtful enough to close. "Customers are more important than rain...," so says the PWB. I parked my car in the middle of the the second floor of a parking garage near King, and I'm getting a little worried about it now because lots of things are starting to blow around. Well, if the power goes out and our propane-powered generator blows off of the top of the building, then I get to leave (or go hide), because the computers and the phone system won't work.
Mailing lists are not being mirrored.
Christopher A. Bohn
cb
Oooh! What does this button do!?
"people THINK that indutrialization is responsible, the fact is that the temperature of the earth varies quite significantly. There have been several large varriations of temperatures in the past century. There were many large storms in the 50-60, then it slowed down, and now its going back up. The coldest time recorded i believe was in the mid 1850's. The net difference since 1850 is several degrees, but i doubt its that significant compared to the last 10,000 years. It is possible that in 100 years there may be fear of global cooling (guess who the enviromentalists will blame that on). "
What has happened in the last 100 or 200 or even 500 years is, for the most part, unimportant. People need to start thinking on a much longer-term time scale than their considerably short lives. The global warming problem is important in this respect. The problems with global warming models occur on time spans of several 100's to 1000's of years. What's would happen in the next 50 or 100 years is irrelevent. This is why it is important to assume that "global warming" theory is correct, even if it is hogwash. Only now, at basically the beginning, do we stand a reasonable chance of determing an outcome that may not be realized for several hundred years. If we can act in a way that would logically benefit the future, is it not our responsibility to do so? In all reality, is does not make sense to spend 20-100 years arguing about the data when the time to act is now. The only thing that could happen as a result of immediate action is a better world.
A friend of mine works tech support at Red Hat, and they spent yesterday shutting down and boxing up desktops and stuff so that if the roof blows off the building, they can relocate the office quickly.
Why is this a possible problem? Apparently, Red Hat's roof is only rated up to sustained winds of 60mph. Considering the last forcast put us at winds of 80+ mph when it hits the Triangle, it might take a little extra time for Red Hat to get things rolling again. I hope they *have* someplace to relocate to.
Some of those support guys had uptime measured in months. Too bad. Now that they're down, though, some of the older ones can be upgraded. Penguin mints are just the thing.
From a network engineering viewpoint, I am completely enchanted with the idea that we can build networks that will be available to online communities regardless of little inconveniences like category 4 hurricanes.
... :)
It stands as proof of the importance of the work that the geek community is doing that systems are regularly put into place that will withstand natural disasters. If this stuff wasn't important, companies wouldn't go to the lenghts that they do to make sure their web sites are up regardless of natural disasters and rogue backhoes. Here's to internet resiliency (assuming, of course, that the 'NIC doesn't screw up RedHat's zone propagation
good. fast. cheap. (pick any two, you can't have all three)
My company did something I'm very proud of - They shipped a bunch of volunteers from Tech Support in our Orlando office, and set them up in temporary office space in California, to assure service continuity.
This is responsible business practice.
If you call my company, and get through to tech support, then you probably know what company I'm talking about. Tho I'm posting anonymously, because I'm not sure if it's kosher to make this public knowlege, tho I'm not sure why it wouldn't be. Our company is a little paranoid about stuff like this.
Scratch, scratch. Yeah I do remember this happening.
M$ Spokesperson -
Lightning and hail cause the server to loose power. Yeah that's our story and we're sticking by it.
Ok not quite the same thing, but still...
"Some companies loose their services because of a thunderstorm - it takes a major hurricane to shut down RedHat!"
Comeone RedHat! where's the balls.. At least set
up a webcam for us poor smucks in the northeast
to check this thing out:) J/K
Go home.. board up.. Hope everything stays safe
down there. Can't have my favorite distro and its
staff washed out to sea can we.
Malice95
but hurricanes pack quite a bit more power than even atomic bombs. you gotta love mother nature.
I tried to find the article I read. In a quick search of the web, it appears that global warming will cause more intense storms. It also appears that El Nino causes less hurricanes to form in the Atlantic. Here are some links.
9 6/hurr_apr96/node6.html a nina/ s .html
http://www.usc.edu/org/seagrant/elnino/
http://typhoon.atmos.colostate.edu/forecasts/19
http://www.disasterrelief.org/Disasters/980728l
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/1998/hurricane
Fascinating information. How we are changing the planet without having much control over what we are doing.
Reuters(tm): "A spokeswoman for Microsoft said that Red Hat's outage is proof that Linux should not be considered stable and reliable. 'Microsoft servers, located on the West Coast, will continue to operate normally throughout the duration of this storm'."
It is possible to harden electronics against EMP. In fact, a mild hardening is always done on all long-haul power and phone lines since solar flares can produce the same effect, but at a much lower level. Both caused induced currents in conductor loops, but nuclear explosion EMPs have a far shorter 'rise' time than solar flares, and IIRC it's this rapid rise time, not the total power delivered, that causes problems to unhardened electronics.
For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong. -- H L Mencken
*For the record, this is a hoax and not an actual article*
YDNet, Raleigh NC. - Many analysts expressed continued concerns today over the reliability of the Linux operating system. This operating system has recently made in-roads into the server market with support from major companies such as IBM.
However, it appears that, along with it's lack of multi-processor support and poor performance serving static web pages, the operating system lacks another feature required for the enterprise market: the ability to withstand a category 4 hurricane.
This problem came to light today as Redhat software prepared for Hurricane Floy by shutting down all computers at the Redhat site. This stand in sharp contrast to Microsoft's Windows 2000 operating system, which is currently being modified to better withstand large storms (see www.windows2000test.com). Analysts agree that Microsoft has more experience experience in recovering from this type of failure than any other enterprise operating system vendor.
Fred Foolish, an MCSE in the Raleigh area, was heard to say "Yeah... Maybe Linux is enough for a small company, but for companies that need to withstand more than a light sprinkle, enterprise class reliability is needed".
Fred Mud at Microsoft agreed. "One of the best features of our high-value proposition product, Microsoft Windows 2000,software is its ability to quickly recover from storms. Microsoft has a lot of experience in the area of post-storm recover " Mud also dismissed the announcement that most redhat.com services would continue, noting that it is generally agreed by enterprise analysts that Linux still needs to work on Enterprise Class features like clustering, saying "It's just impossible I tell you!"
Redhat software was not reached for comment at their Bahamas office in time for this story.
-- Slashdot sucks.