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Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

status.slack.com

161–170 of 246 posts

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a genius at IBM Are you saying it is the user's fault where it is clearly Slack's inadequate implementation that is the problem?

i stand by my opinion that "lets create one chat room and invite hundreds of thousands of people into it" is a bad idea regardless of what technology implements the chat room

If you want to tell everyone in your company something, you could email them I guess. Is it the fact that it's a "chat room" which means you expect it not to work? What's best, here? SMS? Email? Putting something on the website and making everyone check the website once a day at noon? Tell one in ten people and get them to "pass it on"?

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At one stage when there was an outage about a year ago, folks at work were scrambling around trying to get HipChat resurrected (which we'd been using prior to moving to Slack). I had an ircd of some description installed, configured and ready for use in under 3 minutes, and started to get my team using it as a stop gap measure. Had that rolling long before either the outage was resolved, or the HipChat server was res…

Do you have a recommended server / client? The last time I tried to use IRC (joining an existing chat) I actually had quite a bit of trouble, and ended up just giving up.

irssi for a client

Freenode runs this one for a server.

https://github.com/freenode/ircd-seven

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At one stage when there was an outage about a year ago, folks at work were scrambling around trying to get HipChat resurrected (which we'd been using prior to moving to Slack). I had an ircd of some description installed, configured and ready for use in under 3 minutes, and started to get my team using it as a stop gap measure. Had that rolling long before either the outage was resolved, or the HipChat server was res…

Do you have a recommended server / client? The last time I tried to use IRC (joining an existing chat) I actually had quite a bit of trouble, and ended up just giving up.

Inspircd is pretty easy to set up (as a server). Hexchat is a great client, Weechat is great for a commandline client. If you have server access you can also set up Kiwi which is a webclient, making it easy for those with less tech prowess to connect.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#164
post #142
post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Come on, in the 90s and early 00s, volunteers ran and managed IRC networks scaling up to hundreds of thousands of users. This was back when hardware and bandwidth were much weaker and 100x more expensive. It's really not that hard.

Yes, volunteers ran these things. How many? Because you're going to need to have paid employees rather than volunteers running your servers. Is it going to be more reliable and cost effective than just paying a third party to run a service for you?

For something like IRC? Yes. The service is dead simple and one server can handle thousands of users with modest hardware and without breaking a sweat. A completely unfamiliar sysadmin could set it up in an hour or less. Since it's probably internal, there's little need for public services (nick/channel registration, etc).

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#165
post #148
post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Does it scale well? It's IRC. On modern hardware. It's practically infinite. > it has a million and one service integrations, which IRC doesn't. There and were are things way before Slack, eg https://loqi.me/

Obviously you can create IRC integrations for anything. But how many are installable with one click, like Slack integrations are? Having to write custom implementations is yet another extra task and point of failure compared to just paying someone to manage it all for you.

another "but".

First "but it doesn't scale". Now "but integrations".

There will always be another "but", and there will always be a link on the internet showing that it's been done already.

"but shiny web gui" - https://thelounge.chat/

"but mobile app" - https://github.com/MCMrARM/revolution-irc

"but it's complicated" - https://www.mirc.com/ since 1995

IRC does have limits. Some. One is that to make it "modern" it needs a bouncer - that said znc is spectacularly simple to set up with it's web interface.

Integrations were never one of those limits. Just google IRC bots.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#166
post #145
post #74

Can someone explain to me why any company should outsource something as critical as internal communication to a company that is 5 years old? The video messaging left aside, is it really that better than time-tested solutions like email or just running an IRC server?

IRC is pretty much useless since you don't have history. Comparing Slack and IRC are like comparing TCP and HTML5. Why IRC is pretty bad in enterprise: - no audio / video - no history - no SSO / AD integration - no rich features like links, pictures, upload docs ect ... - easy bot integration with APIs, I can have Datadog pushing things to Slack ( alerts, graph... ) - no archiving channels on the go, Slack is very us…

matrix does all that and can be self hosted - ours is.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i stand by my opinion that "lets create one chat room and invite hundreds of thousands of people into it" is a bad idea regardless of what technology implements the chat room

If you want to tell everyone in your company something, you could email them I guess. Is it the fact that it's a "chat room" which means you expect it not to work? What's best, here? SMS? Email? Putting something on the website and making everyone check the website once a day at noon? Tell one in ten people and get them to "pass it on"?

Is this a serious question? Companies have been using email for internal announcements for decades.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#168

One problem with Slack we have in the finance world is that _literally everything_ employees say on company assets needs to be recorded and readily accessible for audit (No this is not an invasion of privacy, you're on company time on company systems, we don't peer into your personal phone or anything). Unfortunately, Slack does not do this very well. I'd really like to know if there's another service that _does_ do…

Slack records everything you do in an immuteable audit log. It's used by lots of finance companies as well as government institutions ( who have just as strict if not stricter rules ). Also they have lots of features to help with e-discovery, so not only is everything recorded, but getting your needed data out is quite easy.

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#169
post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, volunteers ran these things. How many? Because you're going to need to have paid employees rather than volunteers running your servers. Is it going to be more reliable and cost effective than just paying a third party to run a service for you?

For something like IRC? Yes. The service is dead simple and one server can handle thousands of users with modest hardware and without breaking a sweat. A completely unfamiliar sysadmin could set it up in an hour or less. Since it's probably internal, there's little need for public services (nick/channel registration, etc).

So what about the mobile device issue? Corporate logins?

If you want to match what Slack offers you aren't just running an IRC server, you're going to have a small fleet of dependent services that, added up, just about match what Slack does.

Is it really that surprising that people just opt to pay for someone to deal with all of this for them?

Re: Slack – Degraded service affecting multiple features

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What OSI layer are we discussing?

Interestingly that you say this; we need an additional layer called layer 8. As app is 7 but we have grown beyond the seven into meta layers of service types which have become the favric of how we operate... such as email, txt, chat etc to keep all other aspects of infra up and running.

the OSI model is not a truthful representation of the different layer of networking. Things get messy between layer 2 and 3 (ARP for instance?).

Also, everything above layer 4 is a enormous mess, considering that stuff is usually happening at the application itself anyways. There are network protocols which have proper OSI seperation, but they are rarely used. (IS-IS in combination with CLNS for instance).

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