Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 4, 2014 23:20 UTC (Thu) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051)
In reply to: Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems by Cyberax
Parent article: Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

No need to take it personally. But, sad to say, you learned a good lesson the hard way in sysadmining - never rely on one system for anything vital. :)

Again, the answer to system hangs (which are *inevitable* - this is *commodity hardware* we're talking about most of the time, not mainframes) is remote power booters. I don't like living in the DC, myself.

Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 4, 2014 23:33 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Lots of companies can't afford to make a completely redundant infrastructure. Especially if you have a fairly powerful server (that one was handling storage for CCTV streams and lots of other tasks). And anyway, it's non-trivial in any case.

> Again, the answer to system hangs (which are *inevitable* - this is *commodity hardware* we're talking about most of the time, not mainframes) is remote power booters.
Oh, I've witnessed mainframe hangups. Remote reboot is nice, but that server was from around 2006 so it didn't have IPMI and the datacenter where it was hosted offered only manual reboots.

Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 5, 2014 4:09 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (2 responses)

> - never rely on one system for anything vital. :)

That sounds dangerously close to internalizing and making excuses for unreliable software rather than engineering better systems that work even in the crazy imperfect world, duct taping and RPS to the side of a machine is in addition to not a replacement for making it work right in the first place.

Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 5, 2014 4:43 UTC (Fri) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link] (1 responses)

It might sound close, but it isn't. :)

I don't think what you are saying are actually separate tasks. All software has bugs.

Poettering: Revisiting how we put together Linux systems

Posted Sep 5, 2014 14:45 UTC (Fri) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

Sure all software has bugs but the risk and impact are not equally distributed.