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Is it very important that they have someone to restore service at 3am? This isn't a hospital here; it's more like a library. My library is closed at 3am every d

Is it very important that they have someone to restore service at 3am? This isn't a hospital here; it's more like a library. My library is closed at 3am every day!

aurareturn 1mo ago
Ok how about 6am? 7pm? The point is that someone needs to bring the service back up and they can't rely on volunteers to do it whenever they feel like it.
- ndriscoll 1mo ago
  My local library isn't open at 6am either (opens at 9, or 10 on Sat and 1 on Sun), and closes before 7 on Fri-Sun. > someone needs to Do they though? Why is there some assumed urgency? What happens if they don't do it "whenever they feel like it" (e.g. normal hours)? Computers also generally don't randomly just stop working, and if they did in this case (network engineer), it's almost certainly the ISP anyway.
  - aurareturn 1mo ago
    Archive is likely one of the top traffic destinations on the internet. Your local library is likely not. Maybe they want to hire someone full-time is so they don't have to have a policy of whenever they feel like it? Having a reliable service is likely one of the reasons why their donors donate in the first place. Why do organizations and wealthy people still want to donate if the service goes down for 2 days and no one cares? Why would this kind of non-profit attract top volunteers in the first place?
    - ndriscoll 1mo ago
      High traffic doesn't mean high urgency. New York Public Library is huge and looks to have even more restrictive hours than mine. They're closed on Sundays! People donate because they believe in the mission, and most of the money probably goes to the actual storage (making the cost of an employee probably pointless to care about, of course). It would attract top volunteers in the first place because they'd think "I want this to exist, and perhaps they need some help." No one's going to think "wow the wayback machine was unavailable for two days? What a bunch of amateurs." Actually even if they paid me $200k, I'd assume they have some priority issues if they wanted me to be on-call and couldn't convince me of why that's necessary. That'd be a huge red flag for some nightmare mismanagement.
  - deleted 1mo ago
    [deleted]
justin66 1mo ago
> Is it very important that they have someone to restore service at 3am? Depends on the service, but any effort to maintain this daft "gosh, what are they worried about, it's just the internet archive" line of thought is going to depend on either trivializing the needs of their staff, their users, or their computer systems. Good on them for taking things more seriously. (3:00 AM on the west coast is work hours for some of their volunteers, users, and contributors across the globe) > My library is closed at 3am every day! A library will have IT staff on call. Staff need their computers to work when they come in in the morning, users need the infrastructure working in order to do pretty much anything - and why the hell shouldn't people be able to use an online borrowing service in the middle of the night?
- ndriscoll 1mo ago
  They can use an online service in the middle of the night, but as a citizen, I'd be upset if I learned my public library were paging someone in the middle of the night if it weren't working. That's incredibly inappropriate. It can wait. Like I said in another comment, computers generally don't just randomly stop working, but no, a library worker doesn't need their computer at 9am so badly that they need an on-call IT worker (and presumably some kind of middle-of-the-night monitoring) to ensure it before they get in. Patrons don't have some incredibly urgent need to borrow a book such that we need 5 nines of uptime here. Or any SLA at all. It's fixed when it's fixed. This attitude is how you waste a ton of money overcomplicating everything while making working conditions terrible for literally no reason. We should not "take seriously" things which are not serious just for fun. Nothing bad happens if the library computer is down for a couple hours beyond maybe some mild disappointment, or perhaps manually writing the data on cards like we did 30 years ago for a bit. Hell, most banks in the US are "closed" for maintenance online for several hours every weekend (or at least they were as of a couple years ago) and no one cares. It's fine. I work on systems that are in the critical path of 24/7 manufacturing lines, so I'm familiar with things that actually do rapidly cause problems if there's an outage. But that's not every computer system in the world. And if they have people across the globe, then problem solved; they don't need a 3am on-call.
  - justin66 1mo ago

Is it very important that they have someone to restore service at 3am? This isn't a hospital here; it's more like a library. My library is closed at 3am every day!

aurareturn 1mo ago

Ok how about 6am? 7pm? The point is that someone needs to bring the service back up and they can't rely on volunteers to do it whenever they feel like it.

ndriscoll 1mo ago
My local library isn't open at 6am either (opens at 9, or 10 on Sat and 1 on Sun), and closes before 7 on Fri-Sun. > someone needs to Do they though? Why is there some assumed urgency? What happens if they don't do it "whenever they feel like it" (e.g. normal hours)? Computers also generally don't randomly just stop working, and if they did in this case (network engineer), it's almost certainly the ISP anyway.
- aurareturn 1mo ago
  Archive is likely one of the top traffic destinations on the internet. Your local library is likely not. Maybe they want to hire someone full-time is so they don't have to have a policy of whenever they feel like it? Having a reliable service is likely one of the reasons why their donors donate in the first place. Why do organizations and wealthy people still want to donate if the service goes down for 2 days and no one cares? Why would this kind of non-profit attract top volunteers in the first place?
  - ndriscoll 1mo ago
    High traffic doesn't mean high urgency. New York Public Library is huge and looks to have even more restrictive hours than mine. They're closed on Sundays! People donate because they believe in the mission, and most of the money probably goes to the actual storage (making the cost of an employee probably pointless to care about, of course). It would attract top volunteers in the first place because they'd think "I want this to exist, and perhaps they need some help." No one's going to think "wow the wayback machine was unavailable for two days? What a bunch of amateurs." Actually even if they paid me $200k, I'd assume they have some priority issues if they wanted me to be on-call and couldn't convince me of why that's necessary. That'd be a huge red flag for some nightmare mismanagement.
- deleted 1mo ago
  [deleted]

justin66 1mo ago

> Is it very important that they have someone to restore service at 3am? Depends on the service, but any effort to maintain this daft "gosh, what are they worried about, it's just the internet archive" line of thought is going to depend on either trivializing the needs of their staff, their users, or their computer systems. Good on them for taking things more seriously. (3:00 AM on the west coast is work hours for some of their volunteers, users, and contributors across the globe) > My library is closed at 3am every day! A library will have IT staff on call. Staff need their computers to work when they come in in the morning, users need the infrastructure working in order to do pretty much anything - and why the hell shouldn't people be able to use an online borrowing service in the middle of the night?

ndriscoll 1mo ago
They can use an online service in the middle of the night, but as a citizen, I'd be upset if I learned my public library were paging someone in the middle of the night if it weren't working. That's incredibly inappropriate. It can wait. Like I said in another comment, computers generally don't just randomly stop working, but no, a library worker doesn't need their computer at 9am so badly that they need an on-call IT worker (and presumably some kind of middle-of-the-night monitoring) to ensure it before they get in. Patrons don't have some incredibly urgent need to borrow a book such that we need 5 nines of uptime here. Or any SLA at all. It's fixed when it's fixed. This attitude is how you waste a ton of money overcomplicating everything while making working conditions terrible for literally no reason. We should not "take seriously" things which are not serious just for fun. Nothing bad happens if the library computer is down for a couple hours beyond maybe some mild disappointment, or perhaps manually writing the data on cards like we did 30 years ago for a bit. Hell, most banks in the US are "closed" for maintenance online for several hours every weekend (or at least they were as of a couple years ago) and no one cares. It's fine. I work on systems that are in the critical path of 24/7 manufacturing lines, so I'm familiar with things that actually do rapidly cause problems if there's an outage. But that's not every computer system in the world. And if they have people across the globe, then problem solved; they don't need a 3am on-call.
- justin66 1mo ago