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Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

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Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#271

Post by tapoxi »

sanderjd wrote: post #260
tapoxi wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's plenty of decent XMPP clients, like Spark ( https://igniterealtime.org/projects/spark/ ) but they'd take an IT team to configure. Matrix has Riot ( https://riot.im/app ) but personally I find it incredibly confusing.

I'll have to take a look at Spark. I don't think it's a problem if something needs to be initially deployed and configured by an IT department (or otherwise tech savvy individual or group), as long as its onboarding and primary usage flows are straightforward. An arbitrary non-tech-savvy but internet-familiar employee needs to be able to create an account, browse and join rooms, and search through history without any…

It's certainly the closest of all XMPP clients I've used, since it has a very friendly interface. Their related Openfire XMPP server is also targeted at internal deployments and is very easy to configure with a web UI.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#272

Post by danmg »

vertex-four wrote: post #262
danmg wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Small ircds that you would run for a single team don't split because it's a single server. Large networks can have the servers go up and down, and it's still not a big deal because of redundancy. DNS round-robin entries mean you don't even have to know the other servers on the network. In 2018 netsplits caused by down links are fairly rare. If you wait six months you might see one.

And if you run a small single-point ircd, at some point, the server or it’s internet connection will fail, and you’re in the same position as when Slack fails. There’s nothing that gets around technical failure. Either you have a single server that’s going to die at some point due to sheer entropy, or you have a somewhat complex distributed system with the tradeoffs you desire that might fail anyway.

The downtime would be for a network connection failure and not because your 'fearless' NoSQL container didn't work as expected. If a transient networking problem like this is a big deal for you, you can easily add either more nodes or move the node to a place with more reliable networking.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#273

Post by danmg »

extra88 wrote: post #255
price wrote: post #251

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A hypothesis I like is that when it's an application you use to communicate with other people, people are a lot less tolerant of a confusing UX. The reason is that when you sit there clicking through a bunch of menus to find something in QuickBooks (or a typical atrocious enterprise app), nobody sees you; and if you screw something up there, you spend some more time fixing it and nobody sees the screwup. Frustrating…

Yes. Also, QuickBooks is accounting, which is supposed to be hard while "chatting" with people is supposed to be easy. QuickBooks doesn't have to suffer in comparison to better UX performing similar tasks in people's personal lives while IRC can be compared (unfavorably) to texting apps, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, AIM once upon a time, etc.

mIRC offers a fairly good UX compared to all those.

If you're setting it up in a corporate environment, just change the ini files so it autoconnects to your server. It'll pop up a list of channels they can join. The server can SAJoin them to particular channels on connection too. The UI is very clean and lightweight: a channel scrolls messages and they appear, there's an input bar at the bottom, and there's a list of users on the side. It's written in MFC and Win32 APIs, so it's blazingly fast compared to most applications, and you can find a version that will run on every computer made in the past 25 years.

The united states military used mIRC extensively for battle field coordination. I think it's up to the task of handling bob from accounting.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#274

Post by fragmede »

codemac wrote: post #164
nojvek wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In light of how Slack and other companies haven't been able to get a decent level of uptime, I have to say, the company known to make huge web applications that don't go down in shame every couple of months is probably Google. I can't remember the last time Gmail was down. It just works! If google is down, probably your internet is down. Their expertise and discipline in distributed applications is unrivaled. I'm gue…

And those SRE's? They use IRC.

How many SREs does Google have on said IRC system?

How many SREs are at Slack, working on keeping their systems up?

Finally, how many SREs could your company dedicate to keeping an internal IRC server up, and supporting it as an internal product?

I can throw ircd on a server; no problem, but there's a little bit more to 6 nine's of uptime than `apt-get install`, the decision wether to use IRC or not should keep in mind Google's resources (in number of people, number of data centers, and amount of money to throw at redundant hardware) to make sure it never goes down, especially when the data center is on fire around you.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#275

Post by extra88 »

danmg wrote: post #273
extra88 wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Also, QuickBooks is accounting, which is supposed to be hard while "chatting" with people is supposed to be easy. QuickBooks doesn't have to suffer in comparison to better UX performing similar tasks in people's personal lives while IRC can be compared (unfavorably) to texting apps, Facebook Messenger, Twitter, AIM once upon a time, etc.

mIRC offers a fairly good UX compared to all those. If you're setting it up in a corporate environment, just change the ini files so it autoconnects to your server. It'll pop up a list of channels they can join. The server can SAJoin them to particular channels on connection too. The UI is very clean and lightweight: a channel scrolls messages and they appear, there's an input bar at the bottom, and there's a list of…

An image search for mIRC shows that it is ugly as shit. It has a sidebar to list channels but the current channel window is still an undifferentiated mess of handles, commands, and actual conversation. Stored communication is mainly a server-side problem but I don't know if mIRC has an interface to show DMs you missed while offline or to indicate which part of a channel's conversation happened since you last looked.

Even if mIRC would suffice for Windows, you've not handled Macs, phones, etc. Who gives a shit if it runs on a 25 year old computer?

The US military has produced some specific examples of good design but isn't known highly valuing usability, let alone whether someone would enjoy using a tool. IRC is very functional and mIRC appears to add a little polish beyond a pure command-line interface, those are bare minimums and not good enough.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#276

Post by vertex-four »

danmg wrote: post #272
vertex-four wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And if you run a small single-point ircd, at some point, the server or it’s internet connection will fail, and you’re in the same position as when Slack fails. There’s nothing that gets around technical failure. Either you have a single server that’s going to die at some point due to sheer entropy, or you have a somewhat complex distributed system with the tradeoffs you desire that might fail anyway.

The downtime would be for a network connection failure and not because your 'fearless' NoSQL container didn't work as expected. If a transient networking problem like this is a big deal for you, you can easily add either more nodes or move the node to a place with more reliable networking.

Or because the IRCd written in 90s-style C++ by some people who honestly don’t know what they’re doing segfaulted, or because you accidentally K-lined 0.0.0.0/32, or because you accidentally filled up the disk with logs because the server’s maintainer was fired and nobody remembers how the system works, or the latest system update borked something, or a failure to update the system allowed someone to attack your network, or the really hacky mechanism you use to enable auth against Active Directory broke or allowed a disabled user to log in, or...

There’s a lot more that can go wrong than that a database falls over. In my experience, IRC servers fall over all the time - it’s just that nobody really cares because their clients just connect to the next server in the list and people resume their conversations a minute later after figuring out what messages actually reached their destination.

Paying IRCCloud to manage an IRC server for you is a reasonable option, but I wouldn’t do it because I think it’s going to be more available, but because I like IRC and believe it provides the functionality I need.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#277

Post by danmg »

extra88 wrote: post #275
danmg wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

mIRC offers a fairly good UX compared to all those. If you're setting it up in a corporate environment, just change the ini files so it autoconnects to your server. It'll pop up a list of channels they can join. The server can SAJoin them to particular channels on connection too. The UI is very clean and lightweight: a channel scrolls messages and they appear, there's an input bar at the bottom, and there's a list of…

An image search for mIRC shows that it is ugly as shit. It has a sidebar to list channels but the current channel window is still an undifferentiated mess of handles, commands, and actual conversation. Stored communication is mainly a server-side problem but I don't know if mIRC has an interface to show DMs you missed while offline or to indicate which part of a channel's conversation happened since you last looked.…

> An image search for mIRC shows that it is ugly as shit.

ok

> It has a sidebar to list channels but the current channel window is still an undifferentiated mess of handles, commands, and actual conversation.

No.

Each channel and private message get their own MDI window you are free to minimize, maximize or layout however you want.

Notifications are turned on by default, but they can be disabled. You'll get a tray notification if mIRC is minimized, and inside the title bar of the window will flash. Notifications happen when your nick is mentioned.

There's a horizontal line that goes across the dialog window that indicates the location of the conversation the last time it was focused.

>Even if mIRC would suffice for Windows, you've not handled Macs, phones, etc. Who gives a shit if it runs on a 25 year old computer?

Other clients work on other platforms. mIRC is just what I brought up since it's desktop windows client and that the most common case for an office environment.

> The US military has produced some specific examples of good design but isn't known highly valuing usability, let alone whether someone would enjoy using a tool. IRC is very functional and mIRC appears to add a little polish beyond a pure command-line interface, those are bare minimums and not good enough.

It's a simple, light-weight way for people to send short text messages in near real time with tens of thousands of people. I think that's good enough, and it works at a scale that far surpasses the SaaS chat options.

Re: Slack outage: Connectivity issues affecting all workspaces

#278

Post by danmg »

vertex-four wrote: post #276
danmg wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The downtime would be for a network connection failure and not because your 'fearless' NoSQL container didn't work as expected. If a transient networking problem like this is a big deal for you, you can easily add either more nodes or move the node to a place with more reliable networking.

Or because the IRCd written in 90s-style C++ by some people who honestly don’t know what they’re doing segfaulted, or because you accidentally K-lined 0.0.0.0/32, or because you accidentally filled up the disk with logs because the server’s maintainer was fired and nobody remembers how the system works, or the latest system update borked something, or a failure to update the system allowed someone to attack your netw…

> Or because the IRCd written in 90s-style C++ by some people who honestly don’t know what they’re doing segfaulted,

Don't use a 20 year old ircd then. Use something like ratbox or InspIRCd.

> or because you accidentally K-lined 0.0.0.0/32 or because you accidentally filled up the disk with logs because the server’s maintainer was fired and nobody remembers how the system works, or the latest system update borked something

Don't let 14 year olds run your server.

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