Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

GitHub is down

status.github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

131–140 of 175 posts

Re: GitHub is down

#131

Post by CMay »

asdfadr1344kk wrote: post #127
cytzol wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do, it's called Fossil! http://fossil-scm.org/ Fossil tracks issues (tickets), documentation, and wiki pages at the same level as it tracks code, so when you clone a Fossil repo, everything gets downloaded to your local computer. You can then respond to tickets and perform repo maintenance offline, syncing everything to the server when you're back up. Edit: A few weeks ago I got a job a one-hour train ride away. I…

<3 Fossil. I wish it were more popular so I could use it on non-personal projects and still have a hope of attracting collaborators...

Yeah, fossil is all I use. It's so clean, tiny and self contained with no install or bloat. I've always been in love with software written that way. It makes me look at things like git as just a product of engineers that can get the job done, but don't know what it means to write good software or use imagination.

Being fair, fossil performance on giant scale projects might not compare quite as well against git or proprietary solutions like Perforce, but for the large majority of projects I expect it is more than adequate.

Re: GitHub is down

#132

Post by blowski »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #106
blowski wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There can be difference between hosting on bare metal boxes and hosting on cloud providers. If you are connecting different services (message queues, databases, storage, transcoding), and spinning up and down instances based on current demand and spot prices, then cloud hosting is totally different. On the other hand, if you are just renting a couple of dedicated cloud instances, then yeah - they're just (virtualized…

Yeah. The problem is, "cloud" now means both of the things you described and then some. Probably the best definition corresponding to present usage of this word would be "not on localhost". (Because yeah, if I host a Dropbox clone on my Raspberry Pi sitting on the wardrobe, I have my files "in the cloud" now.) We need a new word for automated, dynamic allocation/deallocation/management of remote instances for various…

Agreed. Amongst non-technical people, 'in the cloud' just means 'somewhere on the internet'. For example, if I backup my iPhone onto iTunes on my laptop then that's not on the cloud, but if backup to iCloud then it's on the cloud.

I guess it's frustrating that cloud means quite different things depending on the context, but I guess that's true of a lot of language.

Re: GitHub is down

#133

Post by kefka »

amelius wrote: post #98
kchoudhu wrote: post #6

If only we had a version control system that didn't rely on a central hub...

See IPFS. https://ipfs.io/

Oh, I agree. But I still think Git, even over IPFS, has significant failings. Mainly, how do I share the issues and other problems that Github has did their own GUI for?

Fossil SCM seems to fit that bill. As another user said, they can address issues in a local, non-connected manner, and then merge the issues back to main.

The last piece would be to use IPNS so you can have the same key for a changing package. I just hope versioning support gets added in soon (it's in the spec, just not done yet with go-ipfs).

Re: GitHub is down

#134

Post by cytzol »

gkya wrote: post #129
cytzol wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We do, it's called Fossil! http://fossil-scm.org/ Fossil tracks issues (tickets), documentation, and wiki pages at the same level as it tracks code, so when you clone a Fossil repo, everything gets downloaded to your local computer. You can then respond to tickets and perform repo maintenance offline, syncing everything to the server when you're back up. Edit: A few weeks ago I got a job a one-hour train ride away. I…

> Fossil tracks issues (tickets), documentation, and wiki pages at the same level as it tracks code, so when you clone a Fossil repo, everything gets downloaded to your local computer. Issue tracking and wikis are not a version control problem. Sure, their data can be version controlled. And documentation has been version controlled since Sccs, why would it require special care?

> why would it require special care?

It doesn't, really, but it's in the same place as the code and everything else (this is what I meant as being "on the same level"). You don't need to clone the code and then clone the tickets, for instance. When you run "fossil timeline" on your local machine, you'll see entries for tickets being closed and wiki pages being updated interspersed among the actual code commits. This is useful to me as they're as much a part of the project as the code itself. Does this answer your question?

Re: GitHub is down

#135

Post by CMay »

maccard wrote: post #71

The common complaint is that when github goes down so do issue trackers/project management/docs etc. What are the equivalent alternatives for these systems that are distributed, so tolerant to downtime. If you are in a situation that you're using a DVCS but relying on centralised everything else, and saying that you're unable to work because your Issue tracker/CI server is down, have you really gained anything over t…

http://fossil-scm.org/

Re: GitHub is down

#136

Post by Piskvorrr »

progx wrote: post #103
Piskvorrr wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

...which is why we switched to a local instance of Gitlab: stuff still works, no matter whether Github is in business, whether their servers are up, or even whether our internet pipes are up. CLOUDCLOUDCLOUD!!!

And when you local instance did not work becaus of a disk failure? BACKUPBACKUPBACKUP!!!

Haven't had a disk failure kill a server for years (spoiler: RAID); and we do follow backup SOP, thankyouverymuch. Moreover, this is far easier to manage than "Github is down, we don't know anything - what happened, why and how, what is affected, when (or whether) it would come back again."

Re: GitHub is down

#137

Post by amelius »

kefka wrote: post #133
amelius wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

See IPFS. https://ipfs.io/

Oh, I agree. But I still think Git, even over IPFS, has significant failings. Mainly, how do I share the issues and other problems that Github has did their own GUI for? Fossil SCM seems to fit that bill. As another user said, they can address issues in a local, non-connected manner, and then merge the issues back to main. The last piece would be to use IPNS so you can have the same key for a changing package. I just…

> Mainly, how do I share the issues and other problems that Github has did their own GUI for?

I think this should not be done in the same system as where people store their source repos. Mixing the two is convenient, but can stifle innovation. Better to have flexible and well documented abstractions and good separation of concerns.

Re: GitHub is down

#138

Post by cm3 »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #107
colinbartlett wrote: post #69

It's interesting to me to see all the services that depend on or integrate with GitHub in some way, as they all have problems at times like this. My side project https://statusgator.com shows currently a dozen different services all posting warnings or down notices on their status pages. It's mostly CI services and the like, all which break in some way when GitHub is down.

> It's mostly CI services and the like, all which break in some way when GitHub is down. It boggles my mind. If you're not adding a new dependency to the project, your CI server should never hit GitHub when doing builds. Who sets those things up without local cache?

It's a fight against windmills, unfortunately. Anytime someone brings this up with some language's package manager, they are dismissed and the issue is WONTFIX'ed. Most even go so far to misuse git repos for the package index.

Re: GitHub is down

#139

Post by popey456963 »

cytzol wrote: post #86
thecatspaw wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the parent commentator was joking that git _is_ decentralised, but that we made it centralised again by relying on a small number of hosters (github, bitbucket and others)

Heh, don't worry, I got the joke. But I also got the joke the last time this was posted, and the time before that, and the time before that... This just keeps happening . It's not GitHub's fault that they keep getting DDoSed or have a network outage every now and again. But it's not a problem with no solution.

To be honest, I can cope with Github's downtime, it is probably less than if I was hosting a Git solution myself and the service is much more reliable than all the other solutions I've tried (which are either lacking features or have bugs or have massive downtimes).

Github is trying their best as far as I can see, they manage to fix the majority of issues within three hours and even during those three hours its not the end of the world because you can still code.

Re: GitHub is down

#140

Post by Piskvorrr »

mostlystatic wrote: post #92
akerro wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can setup gitlab with clones, if one server goes down, second has a copy. You know, git is a distributed system, unlike github.

But if two systems are identical, wouldn't it be likely that both would break at the same time?

No. Unless you do something dumb like "don't test that the failover system is fully functional before taking the primary offline;" this applies to any maintenance, which also includes upgrades. Usual HA tactics apply - don't rely on one power source, one network link, or just about any SPOF. (Which means that requirements start breeding like rabbits, which gets expensive rather quickly - whereas Github is free-as-in-beer, which is good enough for most people)

Perhaps the only case breaking both at once would be deliberate action (DDoS etc.).

Post reply on HN