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Overheating datacenter stopped 2.5M bank transactions

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Re: Overheating datacenter stopped 2.5M bank transactions

#52

Seems like more testing is in order: > Upon the outage, both banks immediately activated IT disaster recovery and business continuity plans. > "However," according to Tan, "both banks encountered technical issues which prevented them from fully recovering their affected systems at their respective backup datacenters – DBS due to a network misconfiguration and Citibank due to connectivity issues." Perhaps regularly fl…

It's odd that regular testing wasn't part of a compliance framework for them. BC/DR testing has been part of every security/compliance framework I've worked with.

Re: Overheating datacenter stopped 2.5M bank transactions

#53
post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does this surprise you? What is a corporation if not a legal entity designed to launder responsibility? Have a problem with a service and you find out the company you bought from subcontracts to an LLC you've never heard of which in turn subcontracts to four other LLCs one of which is actually liable but only if you can figure out which one, and oh by the way yours has two employees and it's headquarters is a UPS Sto…

> What is a corporation if not a legal entity designed to launder responsibility? Corporations (and other legal entities used for business) are legal fictions that allow people to pool capital for productive endeavors and yes, with limited liability on the parts of the owners, because we as a society decided that encouraging productive endeavors this way is better than the alternative. In a world with no limited liab…

> Corporations (and other legal entities used for business) are legal fictions that allow people to pool capital for productive endeavors and yes, with limited liability on the parts of the owners, because we as a society decided that encouraging productive endeavors this way is better than the alternative.

Worth noting that legal 'collectives' date back to Ancient Rome, city charters, monasteries, guilds in the Middle Ages, etc. While they are currently called corporation, from the Latin corpus for "body (of people)":

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporation#History

The original term was from the Latin universitas, and were universities in (relatively) more modern times when the concept saw uptick in usage (1100s AD).

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University#History

The first collectives were either groups of students coming together to hire teachers (Bologna), or teachers coming together (Paris).

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Bologna#History

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Paris#History

Your local municipality, county, country, etc, are all legal fictions that act as a legal person. Turns out the concept is handy in many situations:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_person

Re: Overheating datacenter stopped 2.5M bank transactions

#54

Seems like more testing is in order: > Upon the outage, both banks immediately activated IT disaster recovery and business continuity plans. > "However," according to Tan, "both banks encountered technical issues which prevented them from fully recovering their affected systems at their respective backup datacenters – DBS due to a network misconfiguration and Citibank due to connectivity issues." Perhaps regularly fl…

Something something, the spare tire was flat.

Re: Overheating datacenter stopped 2.5M bank transactions

#55

The overheating datacenter didn't stop the transactions. It was the technical inability of the banks to fail over which should have been seamless. Outages happen.

IMHO, "fail over" will always fail. Any multi-data-center architecture should actively utilize all data centers, all the time, maybe dedicate more traffic to one or the other. But, if you've got a "passive" data center that you wanna activate during an outage, you're gonna have a bad day. Every time.

Re: Overheating datacenter stopped 2.5M bank transactions

#56
post #21

Seems like more testing is in order: > Upon the outage, both banks immediately activated IT disaster recovery and business continuity plans. > "However," according to Tan, "both banks encountered technical issues which prevented them from fully recovering their affected systems at their respective backup datacenters – DBS due to a network misconfiguration and Citibank due to connectivity issues." Perhaps regularly fl…

Kind of a spicy opinion as a SRE, but if your disaster recovery strategy isn't part of your operational strategy then it's not actually a strategy. It's a moonshot in the face of failure.

Moonshot is being generous.

It’s two steps away from Apollo 13. Build a CO2 scrubber out of parts in this box. You have twelve hours until the crew suffocates and dies.

Re: Overheating datacenter stopped 2.5M bank transactions

#57
post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Kind of a spicy opinion as a SRE, but if your disaster recovery strategy isn't part of your operational strategy then it's not actually a strategy. It's a moonshot in the face of failure.

That's a strategy. And depending on your downtime tolerance it may be an acceptable strategy. In this case it probably wasn't an appropriate strategy.

Sticking your face in front of a pit bull you’ve never met before is “a strategy”.

If you’re going to use the word strategy this way it has no meaning, which kills the conversation and communication in general.

I think you’re confusing strategy and behavior. Strategy is a plan to do better than default behavior.

Re: Overheating datacenter stopped 2.5M bank transactions

#58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually said: Except that those transactions don't count until they get on the main chain While you quoted me as: > those transactions don't count You lost some of my message. Maybe your are reading it through a lightning node and it went offline half way through. There is no such "single penny" limit. No one said that, but lightning's examples are always these nonsense situations of paying a single party a thousa…

> You lost some of my message. So what's your point? Your point is that the balance will be reflected in the first layer after some time instead of being reflected after each and every lightning transaction? What does that have to do with what we were talking about? The point of this thread was how many transactions per time period you could do with Bitcoin, not whether the balance will be public information in real…

Lightning allows you to have an effectively limitless transaction rate

Transactions that don't count and aren't useful to anyone until they become a bitcoin transaction, and that's still expensive and slow.

No one cares about it because it is terrible technology that doesn't actually solve anyone's problems, because the people that made it made the problems in the first place.

Re: Overheating datacenter stopped 2.5M bank transactions

#59
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sent them over but I used a third layer network (a spreadsheet on my desktop)

Can't tell if sarcastic or not. But, that's perfectly legitimate. You could do that and if everything is signed correctly, the network will accept it. I could write down a seed phrase on a piece of paper and hand it to you, and that's a completely offline transaction.

You don't need a network at all. Just email me who you want to transact with and I'll create a row for them.

Re: Overheating datacenter stopped 2.5M bank transactions

#60
post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a strategy. And depending on your downtime tolerance it may be an acceptable strategy. In this case it probably wasn't an appropriate strategy.

Sticking your face in front of a pit bull you’ve never met before is “a strategy”. If you’re going to use the word strategy this way it has no meaning, which kills the conversation and communication in general. I think you’re confusing strategy and behavior. Strategy is a plan to do better than default behavior.

Sticking your face in front of a pit bull is a strategy for what?

Writing up a plan for disaster recovery is a strategy for disaster recovery. The pros are that it is cheap and ticks the regulatory checkboxes. The downside is that it has a high probability of a high recovery time in the case of a disaster.

My point is that there are different pros and cons to every strategy that you can pick. I also don't think that all strategies are better than "default behaviour" whatever that is.

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