Schlock Mercenary datacenter evacuated... update is 3 hours early

Comment by Sena Kathryn

	From: jesser1975	Date: June 1st, 2008 12:10 am (UTC)		(Link)

You are muoy awesome! I was wondering where my Schlock-fix would come from today.

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	From: zoyx	Date: June 1st, 2008 12:31 am (UTC)		(Link)

Chinese cyber-terrorists... has to be.

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	From: wekm	Date: June 1st, 2008 12:39 am (UTC)		(Link)

Had major spyware bomb go off in my friends laptop today as well. totally hosed, full reload.

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	From: salkryn	Date: June 1st, 2008 12:41 am (UTC)		(Link)

It's not just Schlock that's down. As far as I can tell, all of BLC is down, since I can't get onto their forums, or Wapsi Square.

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	From: howardtayler	Date: June 1st, 2008 01:35 am (UTC)		(Link)

Right. That's all part of the EV1 datacenter.

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	From: salkryn	Date: June 1st, 2008 02:18 am (UTC)		(Link)

Right, I thought it might be, but I wasn't sure.

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	From: rlg	Date: June 1st, 2008 03:04 pm (UTC)		(Link)

sluggy.com is down as well. Makes me wonder if they're at the same datacenter.

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	From: media_res	Date: June 1st, 2008 01:48 am (UTC)		(Link)

Agh, thank you so much! With all these BLC sites down, my webcomics reading for today was significantly less awesome. (Which is really bad, because Saturdays are bad days for webcomics even without half the good ones being down.)

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From: themadkansan	Date: June 1st, 2008 04:07 am (UTC)		(Link)
Unfortunately...

Things like this happening (among others) with near-daily frequency are why Illiad moved UserFriendly away from EV1 back in 2004.

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	From: howardtayler	Date: June 1st, 2008 04:12 am (UTC)		(Link)
	What's your point?

What's your point?

This is the first outtage I've had with them in four years. This kind of thing could happen to anybody. The only way to prevent it is to mirror the datacenter in another city. It's called a "smoking hole" solution, and it gets pricey.

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From: themadkansan	Date: June 1st, 2008 04:29 am (UTC)		(Link)
Re: What's your point?

Just stating what has happened with them in the past; they may have sacked and reorganized completely since then - I don't know. I just know that in 2004, their hosting service was being persistently dodgy to the point of sites being totally unreachable for several hours a day on a regular basis; Illiad went around with them for what seemed like a month or more trying to get them to fix the problem before he finally threw up his hands and moved the whole thing.

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	From: bibliophage	Date: June 1st, 2008 08:53 am (UTC)		(Link)
	Re: What's your point?

I've had customers with RackShack/EV1servers/ThePlanet since they first opened, and this is the first time I've seen the datacenter cratered.

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	From: david_feuer	Date: June 2nd, 2008 01:32 pm (UTC)		(Link)
	Not a total smoking hole

In a smoking hole situation, the servers are destroyed too. Here, I see two clear weaknesses: There was only one power room (no redundancy), and it was in the same structure as the datacenter (allowing the explosion to cause heavy damage to the first floor wiring). All that said, I think it's amazing and wonderful that no one was injured in this incident.

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	From: cyclophile	Date: June 1st, 2008 06:37 am (UTC)		(Link)

Yay! The fix! the Fix!

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	From: r_caton	Date: June 1st, 2008 09:44 am (UTC)		(Link)

Thank you, Mr Tayler, Sir.

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	From: op_longshot	Date: June 1st, 2008 10:46 am (UTC)		(Link)

Curiosity, why the switch from metric to Imperial units in the text box?

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	From: howardtayler	Date: June 1st, 2008 01:51 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Mass vs weight. I did it on purpose.

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	From: seekingferret	Date: June 1st, 2008 11:32 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Well, the metric unit of weight is the Newton. The Imperial unit of mass is the pound mass. Either way, it's inconsistent.

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	From: howardtayler	Date: June 2nd, 2008 12:41 am (UTC)		(Link)

And if I'd used Newtons, nobody would have understood the strip at all.

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	From: seekingferret	Date: June 2nd, 2008 12:51 am (UTC)		(Link)

Well, what're we waiting for? Let's switch this country over to metrics already!

"The Canadians will think we're smart.
Or at least they will think we are not as dumb!"

~Atom and his Package, "The Metric System"

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	From: hobnobs	Date: June 1st, 2008 11:11 am (UTC)		(Link)

I got an alert from my hosting company this morning;
"Due to a fire and explosion due to an electrical short at the third-party data centre hosting this machine, ns3.ukservers.net is currently offline. This should have no discernable effect on our services."

ns3 is hosted by ThePlanet, at EV1.

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	From: lionsphil	Date: June 1st, 2008 12:43 pm (UTC)		(Link)

I can just hear the tayler.com server whimpering in the fear that a sizable proportion of the usual daily readers will work out to look here.

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From: chriswheeler	Date: June 1st, 2008 01:07 pm (UTC)		(Link)
Status of H1 datacenter

Ongoing status of the datacenter here:
http://forums.theplanet.com/index.php?showtopic=90185

Guys, I wouldn't be overly critical of their response time.
They are doing everything including moving servers to other data centers to get the customers back up.

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	From: zenkitty_714	Date: June 1st, 2008 01:41 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Explosions and fire?! Zeus, they weren't understating it with "catastrophic failure". I hope no one got hurt over there.

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	From: mouser	Date: June 1st, 2008 03:42 pm (UTC)		(Link)

They say no one got hurt - just THREE walls...

Supposed to start coming up this afternoon.

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	From: ladyfox7oaks	Date: June 3rd, 2008 06:30 pm (UTC)		(Link)

So... the FOURTH wall was left standing? ... good heavens, the servers know how to stay in character, don't they?

Glad everyone was all right and things appear to be working now! :D

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	From: bibliophage	Date: June 1st, 2008 05:40 pm (UTC)		(Link)

Latest information is that they'll be starting to bring power in about 5 PM CST, and will hopefully have servers going online by 9PM.

They'll need that four hour gap for testing of air handling systems, load balancers, and so forth.

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	From: ladyfox7oaks	Date: June 3rd, 2008 06:36 pm (UTC)		(Link)

WOW...
Reminds me of the time the West Coast went down (Some twit with a backhoe pulled up the thigh-thick cable going over Donner Pass... Totally severed it, IIRC-) and we were down for only a few hours before everything was re-routed and back up.
It amazed the heck out of the folks who knew the backstory of the Net, because apparently- when the Defense Dept. first started putting it together, they hoped that communications would only be down for a few days in the case of a catastrophic failure like that.
(But I may be mis-remembering that part of the tale,)

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