Labor Day Outage

Etheric Warriors Archive Misc. section
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Greetings,

Within the realm of what is practical, or prudent, I will attempt to explain what I feel happened to cause the server crash on Labor Day (Yesterday).

I cannot rule out some manner of Network Chicanery on the part of the D00rKn0bs; however, I seriously doubt that was the case. To even attempt to rule it out would require much more work than I could reasonably expend without even any assurance of being able to do so. Going forward at some point, I might very well be interested in setting up a '[Honey Pot

http://www.honeypots.net/:37u357n5
to ‘instrument’ the Miscreants in their game and then we can publish the results

In any case, I believe the Disk that served the site is about to fail. Regardless, it is evident that there is a region on the disk’s magnetic surface coating that has begun to fail. These things are unpredictable. It could last for another year (unlikely), of fail utterly tomorrow, even if I were to restore it to a status of reliable operation, by recreating the file system (after saving ALL the data, then copying the data back to the newly created file system) as then the Operating system would, as a function of creating the new file system map any areas of disk that were unreadable as unusable, and thus no disk writes would ever be attempted to that region of the disk, and therefore, no further errors would be raised. However, once a disk starts to go, it is likely to continue and get worse, and the process would have to be repeated, etc… till the whole thing just died. Therefore, the best thing to do was to move the sites to other infrastructure.

The up shot is that I had hoped to do this regardless, for a number of reasons, and thus it is now accomplished. The new infrastructure makes it MUCH easier, and faster, to recover from such a failure in the future, though even with this new infrastructure if there was such a failure, there would be an outage, but one which I could almost always respond to remotely, without the need to travel to the datacenter, and without having to change out hardware (unless the failure was truly catastrophic, based on the quite resilient nature of the sites newly provisioned hardware).

My apologies for the outage, but these things do happen unless one spends a SIGNIFICANT amount of MONEY, and TIME (more money), to build a load balanced, High Availability, Web Server Farm. If this were a static site I would have already done so. The issue of High Availability gets significantly more complex when there is a database behind the site, as the database would have to be synchronized between the pool of servers in real time. Clearly, such is doable, I have engineered many such sites; however, again, it significantly increases the complexity of the site’s infrastructure to the point of being impractical without large resources.

In any case, we are back up, and I believe ultimately in better shape than before…

Regards,

–Azti

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Thx, Capt. If you tell us how much it costs to get a more secure server disc we’ll all come up with the $. Readers are offering to send contributions to that end. I absolutely want everyone to get their EW fixes without a hitch.

You didn’t mention the many hours, including late night, that you spent repairing the damage, this time, though the last time EW went down it took you several days and a couple of nights to get it back online, followed by some pretty gruesome interference on your end, which shall remain unreported but you did eventually prevail, after all. Was that on Memorial Day? It usually happens on Sundays and holidays–the most devastating glitch was on Christmas a couple of years ago and the server facility in Chile was trashed, that time.

For the record, of course, since Azti took responsiblity for keeping EW from being destroyed by the NSA and MI6 we haven’t lost any data during the subsequent (what shall I call them?) glitches, including that fire that broke out in the middle of the night at the data center, the previous time. Fortunately, the Captain was at the facility at the time and took care of it quick. We’d be dead in the water without his able ministrations.

I suppose the Buddha might take a large, dispassionate view of all this. Detachment is necessary to get a bigger picture of course. I do my best to elevate myself out of the drama, though it’s kind of fun to get these confirmations. A gifter in Australia noted to me, yesterday, that at the same time that EW went down, the government of Australia blocked ctbusters.com from all of its computers. I told him that if EW and worldwithoutparasites.com weren’t also banned by the Oz gov’t my feelings would be hurt. Congratulations, Andy!

Alejandro, our administrator, who has been orchestrating the reversal of the Atacama Desert and has also led the successful campaign to banishethe horrific smog from Santiago (was as bad as Los Angeles’ smog was before Don Bradley erased most of it by 2003), noted that EW has been glowing in a special way, lately, and I think he felt bad that his posting that comment might have initiated an especially strong bitch slap from the NSA in their desperation to stop the expansion of this unorganized effort throughout the world. I assured him that we mustn’t ever feel guilty about sharing uplifting comments publicly.

THANK YOU to EW’s intrepid contributors for all these historic reports! Thank God not many of us, any more, are being poisoned, murdered, psychically assaulted, T-boned in intersections, fired from our jobs, etc., by the way. I think this movement has finally expanded beyond the capability of the terrorists (gov’ts of US, Britain and Israel) to significantly discourage us.

Ben and I were on our way to gift Puget Sound when it happened Sunday night. He’s going to post an illustrated report–really big fun and productive and you’ll get a kick out of some of the confirmations, I think. We’re introducing another Don Croft invention, by the way: The Twelve

~Don

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Hey Don, I am so glad that EW is back up and running…I was getting very anxious while it was down for some reason…I just love reading & learning about all of the info on EW…I need my daily EW fix…I am hoping to get registered very soon…
When will we hear about your new invention “The Twelve”? Is it something that will be available to distributors to sell around the world?
~Craig

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

CC’d Ale so he’ll know I invited you, Peach Man. Thx for the encouragement.

The Twelve is suitably arcane and mysterious, don’t worry --discovered accidentally; some might say, ‘incompetently’

~Don

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Tony in Oz assured me in email that this site was already banned from Oz gov’t computers–9 months or so ago. I feel relieved . He also noted that gov’t workers (public servants?) ought to be working, not browsing.

~Don