Operated by electricity and connected by bits of wire

It would almost have been funny, had it not been so annoying.

Yes, Canonical suffered a bit of a blow last night to the tune of server downtime. The datacenter suffered a catastrophic power failure resulting in downtime from approximately 12:00 to 19:30 UTC.

At the time all this was happening, I was doing my usual late-night IRCing. It’s amazing what an uncontrollable inconvenience can do to people.

Channel #ubuntu (irc.freenode.org) gained like an extra hundred people all wanting answers. There were answers in the channel topic, but nobody was listening to them (nothing new there). CAPS LOCK, swearing, ‘zomg ubuntu been hax0rd!’ , and broken records records records records.. provided plenty of target practice for Ops to refine their kickban skills…

<Seveas> I have the kick thing as a shortcut
<elkbuntu> hehe, i imagine you would

It still amazes me how people cannot understand that server uptime anywhere, server farm or not, is alot to do with luck. Nobody can tell when the power go out, or if this UPS will fail, or any number of other things that can affect the running of servers.

For instance, between your computer and this blog, how many connections do you think there are. A dozen, a few hundred? I’m not talking data cable connections here, I’m talking ANY connection.

“downtime is a hazard of having data stored in applicances operated by electricity and connected by bits of wire”