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12/28/2005 08:39:04 PM · #1 |
Please set a policy for what will happen when the site is down for an extended period, during rollover.
Also, define extended period.
:)
Thanks. |
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12/28/2005 08:51:52 PM · #2 |
Still bopping this around I see. ;^)
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12/28/2005 08:54:11 PM · #3 |
This was surely a rare instance that was out of anyone's control. Certainly out of Drew and Langdon's control even if they had not been on holiday with their families.
They were just as unable to access the site as we were.
I'm not really sure what policy we could set for something that is out of our control, do you have any suggestions?
The series of events that led to this outage was certainly crazy. First, D and L had preset the challenge rollover last week since they were both out of town, then, the server crashes before rollover, then, because it was autoset and the server was down, it didn't rollover. Had D and L been around at the exact second the site came up, they may have been able to manually roll it over right then, however, they weren't around.
I hope this helps people to understand exactly how rare this is, and would like any suggestions as to what 'policies' people would like to see.
~Heather~ |
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12/28/2005 09:02:08 PM · #4 |
Just for the record, I have been here nearly 4 years, and I can count the number of times on one hand that this has happened (one finger, maybe). It is a rare oddity, indeed.
That said, I'm sure the admins will review what happened and do something to prevent it in the future.
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12/28/2005 09:17:12 PM · #5 |
Heather,
Again to clarify:
* I don't blame Drew or Langdon.
* I don't blame fate, ye gods, or even the manufacturer of the hard drive that failed.
* I don't blame anyone or anything for the outage.
* I understand the hardware failure and resulting outage were outside of any mortal human's control.
In response to your question:
There are a lot of components, both hardware and software, that go into the functioning of this site. It is not unreasonable to think that one or more of them may happen in the future. Let's take the event, learn from it, and plan for the future.
The fact that there was a thread within the SC about extending the challenge deadline suggests that this is an area in which some policy might be created.
Specifically, you have to set a criteria (or a number of criteria) for an action, and then define the action.
Possible criteria are:
*Total outage of DPC for a specific period of time
*Partial outage of DPC for a specific period of time (for example, homepage works, but submission page doesn't)
*Severe or significant degredation of the site (can be measured by ping times, traceroutes, etc. from different sources)
---I'm sure there's more that I'm not thinking of.
Possible actions are:
*Roll challenges at Midnight anyway (could happen if server is still up, but all network connections to it are down).
*Roll challenges as soon as the problem is resolved.
*Extend challenge submission deadlines for specified time:
==could be amount of time site was down (Site down for 2 hours, challenge deadline extended 2 hours).
==could be set period of time after site is back up (Site down for any period of time, deadline extended 2, 12, 24 hours from time site is functioning again)
==could be set time if the site is back up at that time (Site down for any period of time, challenges will roll at midnight the next day, unless site still down, then roll the next day, etc.)
I'm not advocating any particular set of criteria or actions at this point, but I'd be happy to discuss it more. I work for a company which allows for just over 5 minutes of unplanned outages on our core networks and systems, so I have a little experience at disaster planning. :) |
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12/28/2005 09:23:00 PM · #6 |
As already posted, the admins will review the situation when they find out more about what the source of the problem was. Right now they are still gathering information.
I agree that a policy would be a good thing, and this very well could be the incident that drives us to set one. In the meantime, let's not keep starting thread after thread on the subject.
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12/28/2005 09:24:23 PM · #7 |
Originally posted by kirbic:
In the meantime, let's not keep starting thread after thread on the subject. |
OK. Consider me muzzled. |
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12/29/2005 02:47:18 PM · #8 |
Originally posted by hbunch7187:
This was surely a rare instance that was out of anyone's control.
...
I hope this helps people to understand exactly how rare this is, and would like any suggestions as to what 'policies' people would like to see.
~Heather~ |
Downtime is rare, and reliable hardware (i.e. five-9s reliability = 5 min/year downtime) is expensive. So long as you can gracefully recover from errors, you don't need to incur the expense of a bulletproof host.
Whatever policy you make, people will complain about it. On the other hand, if you don't do anything, they'll complain about that.
Just try and make the policy fair, and known to all, and allow people who gave up and went to sleep enough time to submit. And perhaps send an email informing everyone of the new deadline if there is one.
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