Cox Crow

Outages happen. I know. I make them happen every now and then — it's part of being a system administrator. On the other hand, you want to avoid unscheduled outages. Doing so is called fault tolerance. It leads to high availability.

Last night I avoided an outage on my iMac by knowing just enough UNIX to send a SIGHUP to the Dock. It had stopped responding to mouse events.

5:59:41 PM #
categories: System Administration

This >48 hour outage has almost made up my mind for me. I'll be juggling the pros and cons tonight, but chances are I'll have 1) bought RCN cable modem service, 2) asked BestWeb to forward my e-mail to mac.com, 3) bought a domain via pairNIC, and 4) configured the firewalling rules on Mac OS X by tomorrow morning.

5:50:59 PM #
categories: System Administration

Connected to newdepot.bestweb.net.
220- We are currently suspending ftp services because of difficulties we are
220- having with our raid server. We are currently working to resolve this issue
,
220- and ftp access will be re-instated as soon as we do.
220-
220- Thank you for your patience.
220 newdepot.bestweb.net FTP server (Version 6.00LS) ready.

4:21:40 PM #
categories: System Administration

Microsoft stops new work to fix bugs:

Describing the state of computing today as unstable and unreliable, he said Microsoft chairman Bill Gates "is really annoyed by the incredible pain we put everyone through in computing."

Did Bill sit down at his desk and try to do some work?

4:19:44 PM #

Google programming contest: "Your mission is to write a program (most likely by adding code to the ripper) that does something interesting with the data, in such a way that it would scale to a web-sized collection of documents."

12:10:36 PM #