171–180 of 193 posts
I'm kind of an optimist; I believe it'll only be a matter of hours total outage. The generator is fine, the equipment is fine, the internet connectivity is fine... the only problem is getting fuel up to the generator on the 17th floor, while the fuel pumps in the basement are submerged. Someone will carry it up 17 flights if need be.
I'm a cynic. It's going to be at LEAST a couple of days.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You could siphon the fuel up the tube to the pump at the time of the pump's installation, right? Through a one-way valve?
that is not how a siphon works. The destination must be at a lower elevation than the supply reservoir.
Why would loss of power cause "unrecoverable data corruption"? Don't modern databases work hard prevent this sort of thing?
Too bad that the backup generator refuelling pumps have been submerged (while the generators themselves are running). That sounds like some really ... unfortunate planning of the positioning of these machines, made me think of the Daiichi incident when backup assets failed to come online because parts of the backup infrastructure were destroyed. Not as serious, of course. Fog Creek's hosting isn't a nuclear power pla…
That's the first thing I thought of too. Seems like there should be a new rule that your backup generator infrastructure should be on at least the second floor.
http://saratogian.com/articles/2012/10/30/news/doc5090186b1e...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
You're right, why would we want Joel to step into the field and teach us stuff when we've got you with vast knowledge and your winning manner? After all, all we get from Joel is a decade of sharing what he's worked on and why he's done stuff a particular way, in a relatively transparent manner that allows us to maybe learn stuff but importantly to put it all in a context that allows us each to make a judgement on whe…
I'm not running a blog or expecting anyone to take what they read in a comment on some site on the internet seriously. Label me however you want, it's a free internet (for now, anyway). I still find it funny how anyone can start a blog and become famous for it. Maybe I should do the same and cash in on all that buttery goodness of advertising revenue...
We depend on FogBugz (hosted) to answer our support E-mails. If the downtime is on the order of several hours, I'm fine with it, these things happen. But if (as it looks like) it is on the order of days, I'll be looking for another solution. When you offer hosted services (not cheap, mind you), you take on responsibilities. Among them are disaster recovery scenarios. We do have ours and I'm expecting any company for…
Do you think that your company could do this better at a reasonable cost? How would your company handle a scenario like this internally (an entire data center becomes unrecoverable)? If you don't have a good answer, it's simply grass-is-greener thinking.
And I do not want to host FogBugz myself, in fact I'm paying exactly for the comfort of not having to plan for failures in the case of FogBugz.
Incidentally, we run a SaaS company. Our disaster recovery worst-case scenario means recreating our services from scratch in any Amazon AWS datacenter on Earth in less than 4 hours. Yes, we have an easier job, because we do not store a lot of transactional user data. But our service is also way, way cheaper than FogBugz.
So a couple of things: 1) Like any prepared person, I got all my data out of the east coast before this whole hurricane thing. If someone from Fog Creek hooked me up with some emergency licenses while they got their stuff sorted out, we'd be fine. Actually, this would be a good time to switch to self-hosted. 2) Second, while I was doing our hurricane prep, I ran into this blog post from Joel: > Copies of the database…
What happened to that? Was it turned off? How long did it last?
I also wonder how long FogCreek will still maintain the for-your-server version of FogBugz? Will it still be available next year?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
that is not how a siphon works. The destination must be at a lower elevation than the supply reservoir.
That's what I meant - siphon the fuel up to the pump at installation, so you don't have any gas and don't have to rely on a vaccuum. As the pump draws fuel through the one way valve, the fuel continues to draw more fuel from below.
The first is that the fluid will draw a vacuum at the top of the pump. A vacuum on earth can only sustain 14psi - atmospheric pressure. For water, this constitutes a 33.9' column - after that you could draw a perfect vacuum at the top of the pipe and wouldn't the water to rise higher. Since diesel is less dense than water you might go a little higher, but probably not much.
The second problem is that as you create a low-pressure zone at the top of the pipe, the fluid will boil (cavitate). This gasified liquid will fill the space and drop your pressure. Oils like diesel should have a significantly higher boiling point (aka lower boiling pressure) than water, but it's still a limit.
We're still down. I'm happy for FogCreek, and I'm generally happy with Peer 1, but I wish they would have been honest with everyone in this situation.
Unfortunately smaller Peer 1 companies like mine were told that power was going to be shut and we therefore brought down our servers. We're still down. I'm happy for FogCreek, and I'm generally happy with Peer 1, but I wish they would have been honest with everyone in this situation.