Re: [9fans] sources down?

[Eric Van Hensbergen <ericvh@gmail.com>]

On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 4:15 PM, Uriel <uriel99@gmail.com> wrote:
> Something that is totally unreliable, no matter how cool, is not very useful.
>
> And I think anyone that has limited time, and who wants to get
> something done, will pick "very reliable but totally shit" over "very
> unreliable but very cool" every single time.
>

While not having direct knowledge of what caused the current outage, I
can say that such outages are rarely caused by Plan 9 or the hardware
on which its running.  You see, right now, the Plan 9 machine room
(and the doom room, and much of the offices/lab space around it) are
being repurposed. There are exactly (I think exactly) two people who
turn the lights back on every time something like this happens, and
they get no accolades from the company for providing this free service
to the community -- in fact, their life would be significantly better
if they just left the lights off.  So please, keep antagonizing them
so that they shut this nice free service down -- you'll make their
lives considerably more simple and they can get back to doing real
work.

As ron said, verifying that sources is down on the list (or IRC or
whatever) and then sending a polite note to geoff and/or jmk to let
them know is fine (since they use this infrastructure as their primary
work environment, these problems often cause them more pain than us).
Anything beyond that is ridiculous.  Also  as Ron said, a far more
constructive approach is mirroring (which many already do), and an
even better idea would be for someone to code up a nice little layer
that directs your sources request to the closest available server.

          -eric