4 ms·

I'm not disagreeing, I'm just saying that before people get drunk on schadenfreude they should put themselves in Atwood's position. If you pay someone for a ser

by nkohari 17y ago

I'm not disagreeing, I'm just saying that before people get drunk on schadenfreude they should put themselves in Atwood's position. If you pay someone for a service you generally expect it to work when you need it.

mcantelon 17y ago
Yeah, but if you pay for a mission critical service and never bother testing it, you've pretty much passively decided to fail.
- pyre 17y ago
  The same could be said for CrystalTech
  - mcantelon 17y ago
    I don't think anyone's saying that CrystalTech didn't also fail.
- krschultz 17y ago
  Is codinghorror really mission critical? He will restore from some other backups. Downtime on a blog is not that big a deal other than people like to hate on Jeff Atwood. Now if he lost customer credit card records or something like that, then it would be warranted.
  - houseabsolute 17y ago
    Doesn't Jeff derive a significant portion of his personal income from the site? If so, I'd say mission critical is a good way to describe it.
  - dinkumthinkum 17y ago
    If codinghorror somehow allows Jeff to live without working then I would say it is pretty mission critical. Mission critical doesn't mean the Earth will blow up or something like that.
- gorm 17y ago
  The trick is to simulate a data loss before it happens.
- viraptor 17y ago
  Joining the chorus of other people saying "WRONG". Reason 1: I pay for my bank account one way or another. It's bank's responsibility to keep the system running and secure, not mine. Sometimes we just can't do everything ourselves and have to rely on others. Reason 2: Many of us host something somewhere. How many do backups? How many of us check the backups? How many do check the backups checking process? (enter infinite recursion) You have to stop at some stage. You probably don't have enough time, or your time is not worth enough to check that. He can recover most of his blog from the caches, because it was quite popular. I bet he'll be back with an almost complete archive in less than a week.
  - mcantelon 17y ago
    The bank analogy is interesting and a good point, but the reality of ISPs is that they are less reliable, and less regulated, than banks. If my income is dependent on data, I make sure it gets backed up. If it's an active project, I use my backups to build my dev environments so it's fairly obvious when a backup has failed.
    - thaumaturgy 17y ago
      You have good habits, and that's sincerely commendable. However, it really isn't fair to blame this kind of problem on the end user. Are website developers also expected to keep the servers secure? If Apache isn't patched and up to date, is that the website admin's fault? Service providers are paid to do a job. This one failed tremendously, and should lose a large chunk of business for it. I think Atwood is being far too kind in accepting 50% of the responsibility for the data loss. To put it another way: the only reason to maintain your own backups of your site data -- aside from healthy paranoia -- is because you expect your service provider to fail at doing their job. And if that's the case, shouldn't you be finding a service provider that does it better?
      - antonovka2 17y ago
        To put it another way: the only reason to maintain your own backups of your site data -- aside from healthy paranoia -- is because you expect your service provider to fail at doing their job. And if that's the case, shouldn't you be finding a service provider that does it better? If you don't expect your service provider to fail, you don't know anything about service providers. Everybody fails. Our colocation facility has redundant generator systems. They're tested regularly, and have handled failures previously. Yet, when the power went out, three of the backup generators failed, and our site (as well as Craigslist, Yelp, and others) was out for 45 minutes. The cause? A bug in the backup generator's software: http://365main.com/status_update.html http://365main.com/status_update.html Shit happens. Sometimes it's not your fault. You still need to prepare for it.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
joe_the_user 17y ago
Hmm, It's a lesson on what can and can't be "just bought". Security and backups both need some top-down hands involvement. Also US recent experience dikes and air defenses are important too.

by nkohari 17y ago

mcantelon 17y ago

Yeah, but if you pay for a mission critical service and never bother testing it, you've pretty much passively decided to fail.

pyre 17y ago
The same could be said for CrystalTech
- mcantelon 17y ago
  I don't think anyone's saying that CrystalTech didn't also fail.
krschultz 17y ago
Is codinghorror really mission critical? He will restore from some other backups. Downtime on a blog is not that big a deal other than people like to hate on Jeff Atwood. Now if he lost customer credit card records or something like that, then it would be warranted.
- houseabsolute 17y ago
  Doesn't Jeff derive a significant portion of his personal income from the site? If so, I'd say mission critical is a good way to describe it.
- dinkumthinkum 17y ago
  If codinghorror somehow allows Jeff to live without working then I would say it is pretty mission critical. Mission critical doesn't mean the Earth will blow up or something like that.
gorm 17y ago
The trick is to simulate a data loss before it happens.
viraptor 17y ago
Joining the chorus of other people saying "WRONG". Reason 1: I pay for my bank account one way or another. It's bank's responsibility to keep the system running and secure, not mine. Sometimes we just can't do everything ourselves and have to rely on others. Reason 2: Many of us host something somewhere. How many do backups? How many of us check the backups? How many do check the backups checking process? (enter infinite recursion) You have to stop at some stage. You probably don't have enough time, or your time is not worth enough to check that. He can recover most of his blog from the caches, because it was quite popular. I bet he'll be back with an almost complete archive in less than a week.
- mcantelon 17y ago
  The bank analogy is interesting and a good point, but the reality of ISPs is that they are less reliable, and less regulated, than banks. If my income is dependent on data, I make sure it gets backed up. If it's an active project, I use my backups to build my dev environments so it's fairly obvious when a backup has failed.
  - thaumaturgy 17y ago
    You have good habits, and that's sincerely commendable. However, it really isn't fair to blame this kind of problem on the end user. Are website developers also expected to keep the servers secure? If Apache isn't patched and up to date, is that the website admin's fault? Service providers are paid to do a job. This one failed tremendously, and should lose a large chunk of business for it. I think Atwood is being far too kind in accepting 50% of the responsibility for the data loss. To put it another way: the only reason to maintain your own backups of your site data -- aside from healthy paranoia -- is because you expect your service provider to fail at doing their job. And if that's the case, shouldn't you be finding a service provider that does it better?
    - antonovka2 17y ago
      To put it another way: the only reason to maintain your own backups of your site data -- aside from healthy paranoia -- is because you expect your service provider to fail at doing their job. And if that's the case, shouldn't you be finding a service provider that does it better? If you don't expect your service provider to fail, you don't know anything about service providers. Everybody fails. Our colocation facility has redundant generator systems. They're tested regularly, and have handled failures previously. Yet, when the power went out, three of the backup generators failed, and our site (as well as Craigslist, Yelp, and others) was out for 45 minutes. The cause? A bug in the backup generator's software: http://365main.com/status_update.html http://365main.com/status_update.html Shit happens. Sometimes it's not your fault. You still need to prepare for it.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

joe_the_user 17y ago

Hmm, It's a lesson on what can and can't be "just bought". Security and backups both need some top-down hands involvement. Also US recent experience dikes and air defenses are important too.