From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 MIME-Version: 1.0 In-Reply-To: <5d375e920905221415u2fab4bfchc5ec2ca90da3c12b@mail.gmail.com> References: <13426df10905220951l6ecd3e31t9996dbdb6e7eb3fe@mail.gmail.com> <1B68BBC3-3369-4DE3-B3D8-E32FE7303026@mac.com> <5d375e920905221415u2fab4bfchc5ec2ca90da3c12b@mail.gmail.com> Date: Fri, 22 May 2009 17:18:41 -0500 Message-ID: From: Eric Van Hensbergen To: Fans of the OS Plan 9 from Bell Labs <9fans@9fans.net> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Subject: Re: [9fans] sources down? Topicbox-Message-UUID: fcd92270-ead4-11e9-9d60-3106f5b1d025 On Fri, May 22, 2009 at 4:15 PM, Uriel 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