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Tell HN: Wells Fargo completely offline

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Re: Tell HN: Wells Fargo completely offline

#231

Post by darkpuma »

arkades wrote: post #58
saagarjha wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This page suggests that Inergen (unless there is a thing called Intergen that I'm confusing it with?) mixes with air to lower the oxygen content, but still remain breathable: http://www.tyco.no/products/Gaseous-Fire-Suppression/inergen...

The resultant 12% oxygen is 60% of normal atmospheric air. It's still breathable, if you're an average healthy person with healthy cardiac and pulmonary function, sitting at rest - but it's not healthy, it's enough that you're going to start seeing systemic responses. The reduction in partial pressure of oxygen being sucked into the lungs will also cause an increase in the partial pressure of carbon dioxide and inert…

>The resultant 12% oxygen is 60% of normal atmospheric air.

To put that in perspective, that's like being sent to the top of Pikes Peak (4.3km / 14,000') in seconds. Pilots flying that high in unpressurized aircraft are required to have oxygen masks. Most people will develop altitude sickness when rapidly subjected to that.

When you consider the potential for stress or panic in this kind of scenario, hypoxia emerges as a very real threat even for the young and healthy.

Re: Tell HN: Wells Fargo completely offline

#232

Post by lIl1l »

mabbo wrote: post #12
nemothekid wrote: post #7

Apparently there was a fire in a Datacenter - theres a thread on /r/sysadmin by an insider. https://np.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/ao4g2y/wells_fargo...

Incredible. They had all their mission-critical infrastructure in a single data center. How many billions of dollars do they make per year? And they can't afford even a tiny bit of redundancy? If I were a customer, I'd use this as a sign that this company is not technically competent enough to manage my money.

And they can't afford even a tiny bit of redundancy?

Big companies tend to defer risk. Managers and project leads want to start new projects rather than upgrade existing infrastructure. Combine these forces and sometimes you get a catastrophe.

Re: Tell HN: Wells Fargo completely offline

#233

Post by tnolet »

jedberg wrote: post #175

For everyone complaining about "how could they not have failover" let me ask you this: Would you take a job with Wells Fargo to fix their infrastructure? And if you did take such a job, how long do you think it would take you to get the budget and approvals from all the auditors necessary to fix everything? How much would they have to pay you to take that job, knowing how frustrating it would be to get anything done?…

Well, I bet there are continents of people who would love a corporate IT job at WF. You make it seem like it's equivalent to mining coal in the 1920's.

Re: Tell HN: Wells Fargo completely offline

#234

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

rubyfan wrote: post #176
jonwinstanley wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A bank without redundancy is the best place to have your mortgage. Just hope that one day they forget about your debt.

More likely they will forget you paid them.

Always keep your receipts.

Re: Tell HN: Wells Fargo completely offline

#235

Post by Mister_Snuggles »

krageon wrote: post #214
eljimmy wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Rates are based off a prime lending rate which is equal amongst all the big banks. But like they said, you are free to shop around. Credit unions usually have good offers. Ideally you’re not buying a home that you can’t afford if rates go up too much.

That assumes there is some sane upper bound on rates, but they can fluctuate quite a lot depending on how the economy is doing (7% doesn't seem like too much of a stretch). I agree that you should not buy a house near your carrying capacity, but I also posit that if you start out 7% lower that it will hurt your standard of living more than you expect.

There isn't really an upper bound, but the prime rate doesn't move much. As another comment said, competition between different lenders keeps the rates in check.

Typically the Bank of Canada sets their prime rate, some time later the big banks set their own prime rates based on that, then the mortgage rates are set based on that. The Bank of Canada prime rate only moves by .25% or .5% at a time.

If you have a variable rate mortgage and the rates change, they will be immediately reflected your mortgage. This isn't as bad as it sounds - your payment will stay the same, the rate change just affects how much goes to interest vs principal. The mortgage documents will include the 'trigger rate' which is how high interest rates need to get before your payments no longer cover the interest. This is the point where you're in trouble.

For some variable rate loans, like an auto loan, an increasing rate just means that the term of the loan gets longer or shorter.

As always, ask questions. The bank, in Canada at least, doesn't really want you to default on the loan. Ask about the trigger rate, ask what happens if it gets hit, ask what happens if rates go up but don't hit the trigger rate, ask about lump sum payments.

Re: Tell HN: Wells Fargo completely offline

#236

Post by williamstein »

Wow, functionality is still significantly degraded over 24 hours later. I just tried to log in to check on an account balance, and the site was extremely slow. It showed my balance, but failed every time to load the transaction history with "Error in external system" or something like that. The sign in page still shows: "Alert: Some customers may be experiencing issues accessing online and mobile banking. We apologize for any inconvenience."

Re: Tell HN: Wells Fargo completely offline

#237

Post by Robin_Message »

krageon wrote: post #214
eljimmy wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Rates are based off a prime lending rate which is equal amongst all the big banks. But like they said, you are free to shop around. Credit unions usually have good offers. Ideally you’re not buying a home that you can’t afford if rates go up too much.

That assumes there is some sane upper bound on rates, but they can fluctuate quite a lot depending on how the economy is doing (7% doesn't seem like too much of a stretch). I agree that you should not buy a house near your carrying capacity, but I also posit that if you start out 7% lower that it will hurt your standard of living more than you expect.

The UK typically uses the same system of fixed rates for (usually) 2-10 years.

Story time: several years ago I took out a 10 year fixed rate of 2.99%. My thinking was that since the base rate couldn't really go down any further, I was locking in a good rate.

As it's turned out, so far I could have had a series of 2 year fixed at around 2%, so this was potentially the wrong move, although the maximum downside was limited.

My parents on the other hand took out a 12.99% fix in the early 90's, which turned out to be incredibly unlucky given the unprecedented low inflation of the nineties and noughties.

Re: Tell HN: Wells Fargo completely offline

#238

Post by deevolution »

SketchySeaBeast wrote: post #66
pjc50 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or you could have a Quadriga-like incident where a single person's death or fraud takes out an entire bank?

I think the argument here is that you don't need to keep your Bitcoin in a bank, and instead just horde it all under your digital bed.

It's essentially no different than carrying a credit card in your wallet... The bitcoin network IS the bank, your key is your card. There's no need to horde anything under said "digital bed". It's frightening to see so many ignorant comments.

Re: Tell HN: Wells Fargo completely offline

#239

Post by computerex »

krageon wrote: post #215
computerex wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Facebook handles money too, though. Also I think the parent was making the point that Facebook builds software with resiliency in mind so when a failure does happen, the software deals with it gracefully.

They can have (and did have, at least the long time ago when I still used it) weird cache persistency errors and "please just refresh to fix that" type of workflows if you have bad luck. That sort of behaviour is simply not acceptable for a bank.

Are you talking about Messenger? That was a front-end issue, and they created React/flux to fix that.

Re: Tell HN: Wells Fargo completely offline

#240

Post by esonoi »

benj111 wrote: post #100
mabbo wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Incredible. They had all their mission-critical infrastructure in a single data center. How many billions of dollars do they make per year? And they can't afford even a tiny bit of redundancy? If I were a customer, I'd use this as a sign that this company is not technically competent enough to manage my money.

What kind of redundancy are we talking about here? You can't really roll back say 10 minutes of transactions, so are you maintaining 2 parallel systems? How do you keep them perfectly in sync? This isn't my area of expertise by a long shot, but it occurs to me this is probably hard, especially when your codebase started in the 60s, and has been accreting ever since.

You have a primary and a backup with a synchronous commit protocol. When a commit request is made on the primary, the primary writes to its transaction log and the backup’s log. If the backup does not acknowledge, the commit fails.

The backup doesn’t need to be in the same exact state as the primary (it’s not meant to service requests), it just needs to have a persistent log of what changes were applied so that it can roll forward when needed.

Most relational DBs do something like this for their DR product offering. Oracle has Active Data Guard. DB2 has HADR.

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