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Red Hat and Freshmeat Temporarily Down 112

Posted by CmdrTaco from the fun-and-games dept.
Several people wrote in to say that they can't connect to Red Hat or Freshmeat today- the reason is that Red Hat is moving offices and they have a bunch of servers in transit. Everything will hopefully be back in place soon, so hang in there.
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Red Hat and Freshmeat Temporarily Down More

Red Hat and Freshmeat Temporarily Down

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  • of course this wasn't any surprise to anyone who bothers to subscribe to redhat-announce..

    Date: Thu, 28 Jan 1999 12:46:17 -0500
    From: djb@redhat.com
    To: redhat-announce-list@redhat.com
    Subj: Notice: Red Hat will be off the 'net!

    Red Hat Software is moving to new offices. The part of that move that involves our internet connection and servers will happen this afternoon and early evening, EST. We hope to be back to life quickly, but with these things you never know.

    We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause. We should be running normally by late evening or tomorrow at the latest.

    --Donnie

  • The users must be left with the perception that RedHat cares and knows what they are doing. Furthermore, the users must be left with the fact that Linux is fault tolerant and is highly avalailable.

    The only reason that a Linux server should be unavailable is due to administrator incompetance - and that is exactly what has happened.

    I like RedHat but hey, this is totally unnecessary! How about a mirror that users are automatically shunted to - huh?
  • What's wrong with a commercial organization funding a GNU project? It's hardly hypocrisy, since GNU has no objections to businesses making money off of software so long as they don't restrict access to the source. Red Hat's popularity isn't locked in. Most, if not all, of their tools and niceities are under the GPL--including RPM. Also, Red Hat is still a small company.

    "If GNU were to so chose, would they at anytime be in a position to say that they will host the primary web/ftp sites themselves instead of redhat?"

    If Red Hat tried to play power games, they would probably get branded as 'the Microsoft of Linux' and both flamed and boycotted by the Linux community. Remember, there's not much to stop people from using another distribution. If Red Hat were to cut off GNOME for moving its servers, it would probably hurt GNOME but Red Hat as well.

  • Posted by Bill, the Galactic Hero:



    1) Hanging would cut off my oxygen supply, and I would die.

    2) Even if I were suicidal, I'd just blow my brains out.

    3) If all I had was some rope, I'd much rather hang in here. I cleaned the place up recently.

  • hehe. lets create havoc. lets move our stuff in the daytime.

    hehe. lets be different. lets move our stuff in the daytime.
  • I was shocked to find out that RedHat's gopher site is down!! How could they do such a thing? :^)
  • What is getting me is that for the longest time I've been trying to get things off the mirrors, but guess what? There is nothing in the (yada)Redhat/RPMS directory, anywhere!

    Whats up with that? How am I supposed to install via FTP? Is this just some way of making me buy the CD?

    *grumble*
    ^~~^~^^~~^~^~^~^^~^^~^~^~~^^^~^^~~^~~ ~^~~^~
    ABORTED effort:
    Close all that you have.
  • Its not the money, Superman.

    Its the GPL, which says that it needs to be freely distributable...
    ^~~^~^^~~^~^~^~^^~^^~^~^~~^^^~^^ ~~^~~~^~~^~
    ABORTED effort:
    Close all that you have.

  • Lame! (Score:1)

    by mholve ( 1101 )
    Ever heard of re-routing the DNS to another server? Or how about doing this in the middle of the night when there's probably a few thousand less people looking to get to these sites?

    I'm sorry, but that's piss poor business to have your server down during business hours and it makes Linux look bad.

  • Lame! (Score:1)

    by mholve ( 1101 )
    Well sure, there's the time issue - but business hours in the country it's located in, U.S.A.

  • Yep (Score:1)

    by mholve ( 1101 )
    All very true...
  • Since the bulk of RedHat's traffic probably ends up going to US systems, and that bulk tends to reach a minimum while the US sleeps, it's logical to assume that RedHat's average bandwidth usage reaches a minimum during the night hours in the US.

  • Ah! (Score:1)

    by Daniel ( 1678 )
    That explains why gnome-list is so quiet today. :-)

    Daniel
  • Sadly, it's the truth... you just don't take servers offline like that.. at least the www.
  • Ummm, yup, this is pretty easy to do, except if you expect to get hammered with hits as soon as the temporary server is put online. Since that server would be handling all hits for redhat.com, gnorme.org, rhad.org, and the related ftp sites, the temp server would get hammered to a degree that would bring almost all systems to their kneees.

    I've been in this situation, and agree that it is better to suck it up and take a couple of days of complaints than to attempt an interim fix that is likely to create more problems than it solves.

    Cudos to Red Hat for recognizing this.
  • If you were a paying customer of Red Hat support, syou didn't miss a single minute of support.

    Can you say duhhhh? Can you say luser? what is it with all of these stupid responses without a clue?

    Think about it for a minute. You are moving a server that has a huge number of hits for both the Red Hat and gnome domains. The hardware that has been handling these hits is not tiny. When you propose thowing up your old Pentium 90 to stand in for this server, do you even have a clue how many hits it handles?

    Red Hat did the honest thing for this communn\\\ity. They told us that they would be down while moving. That is Enough for me. I have moved an entire data center / server room and it was not a simple matter. In fact it took planning for months in advance to avoid downtime, yet there was downtime. We are talking six months of advance planning... but still there was downtime.
  • Freshmeat is hosted by Red Hat.

    silly freshmeat.
  • Well, yeah. But to be reasonable (and yo0u really should be reasonable, if you feel the need to go down at all), you should go down during a time period when your traffic is at its lowest. Typically, that's night-time in the United States. (Yes, that's daytime elsewhere... but most traffic still originates in the U.S.)

    Slackware.com, for instance, gets most of its hits right around lunchtime, EST.
  • Try tx.us.mirrors.freshmeat.net or ct.us.mirrors.freshmeat.net, unfortunately, i think these mirrors are stale because the core freshmeat server hasn't been updating them because they are down.

    It gets better:

    fwhois freshmeat.net

    *snip*

    Domain servers in listed order:

    NS.REDHAT.COM 207.175.42.153
    SPEEDY.REDHAT.COM 199.183.24.251

    Which is why I can't use the mirrors. Nobody's pointing to them.

    Red Hat just doesn't have their shit together.
  • subscribe to a few.

    It gets to be a pain in the ass.
  • You miss the point.

    The idea was to announce, ahead of time, that they would be experiencing downtime. Posting it to their mailing list only gets that half-done. Of course everyone's going to find out after the fact.

    Not that experiencing downtime for a server move is anything but unprofessional on their part, to begin with...
  • Was down early this morning (OK, early for me... Before noon anyways, PST), still down at 6:40PM PST... Temporary?
  • This was really poor planning on RedHat's part. I doubt they expected to be down for this long, but it doesn't matter; they should have had some sort of temporary measure up anyway. Can't update Freshmeat? Big deal; keep up a little server that shuttles people off to the mirrors; there's a lot more to Freshmeat than its new-software service (I've been in rather bad need of its search feature, actually; I'm trying to upgrade to 2.2.1 and I need to get the right modutils but can't find it anywhere). Can't host gnome.org? Fine, but at least get one small page up listing the homepages of various software (I've been looking for gdm).

    And so on and so forth and whatever. Really, RedHat shouldn't have done it like this. They should have expected Murphy's law to kick in at some time around noon so they couldn't get back up in time, and had a plan just in case that happened. But they didn't. Hopefully they'll learn from that little mistake.
  • It's true that it's daytime in several timezones all of the time.

    However, you'd think that RedHat would at least have the sense not to move during the daytime in its own timezone.
  • While this is from experience with the local telco to Redhat (GTE), a lot of this is conjecture. It'd be interesting to hear from somebody there what really happened once they're back online. When doing a server move like this, you're also moving your circuit. RedHat has a DS-3, which is a lot more work for the telco to move than a DS-1. What they would have done would be to coordinate the physical move and having GTE move the DS-3 (GTE is the only DS-3 loop provider in their area AFAIK) at the same time. Due to IP issues it can't be active at both ends at once. What probably happened was that Redhat went down, moved their machines, and found out that GTE screwed up with the circuit. AFAIK they have a single DS-3 and no redundancy, which is pretty common, especially since they're on the GTE RTP SONET ring, so additional circuits would all come off of the same SONET, so they wouldn't get much of any real redundancy anyway. GTE is very well known for being late in installing things. (I'm from that area. I worked for an ISP a few minutes from Redhat last summer.)
  • When /. upgraded their coonection in july or august (can't remember) and when the DNS services where so SLOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOW on upgrading the info - I always had to use the IP for the first 4 dyas
  • If I was running a business that needed not much bandwidth for the office (t1 would be fine) but wanted to run its own servers that needed mad crazy bandwidth (>10mbit), I'd colocate to a big ISP. Why pay for running unnecessary leased lines?

    I may have to do this soon anyway. ADSL to the office and a colocation plan is the way to go...and your servers never have to move again, no matter where you go.
  • This is halfway off topic, but not quite...

    I have a SB32 (ct 3600) that doesn't work right under RH5.2. I fixed it before on 5.1 with an article in the mailing list archives, but I can't remember how. Seeing as Red Hat site is down still, I'm up shit creek without a paddle in a stone canoe.

    I have the SOB configured in /etc/conf.modules with:
    alias sound sb
    options opl3 io=0x388
    alias midi awe_wave
    post-install awe_wave /usr/bin/sfxload /etc/midi/GU11-ROM.SF2
    options sb io=0x220 irq=7 dma=1 dma16=5 mpu_io=0x330

    isapnp.conf is set accordingly. All of the modules exist. Sndconfig tries to play the sample.au file, but all I hear is "Hello, th..." and then silence. I configured it in sndconfig as an AWE32, and then a SB16, then a SBPro. Nothing works.

    I've tried it on IRQ 5 and 7, which according to /proc/interrupts are both clear. The kernel gives me messages similar to:
    Soundblaster audio driver Copyright (C) by Hannu Savolainen 1993-1996
    SB 4.13 detected OK (220)
    sb: Interrupt test on IRQ{5,7} failed - Probable IRQ conflict

    Here's my current IRQ listing...

    IRQ 4: Com1 on MotherBoard
    IRQ 3: Supra Express 33.6 PnP (working- with the help of ISAPNP)
    IRQ 5,6,7: Open
    IRQ 8: rtc (What's this?)
    IRQ 9: USB (according to /proc/pci)
    IRQ 10: Open
    IRQ 11: aha152x
    IRQ 12: eth0
    IRQ 13: Math Error (any kernel gurus know WTF this is?)
    IRQ 14: IDE0
    IRQ 15: IDE1

    I fixed it before, anyone have any clue how to do it again? I need my mp3s. I think I'm going through withdrawals....

    Thanks,
    Geoff Davis
  • Thanks for your response, and for the pointers on what those funky irqs were. I fixed the problem...

    I know I should have probably done this before, but I recompiled the kernel. I didn't even have to reboot into the new one, just a make modules and a depmod -av against the newly compiled modules, and suddenly the SOB came to life. Freakin' RedHat precompiled kernel.

    My reccomendation to you would be to try the same thing. It's kinda like the magical 3 reboots of love in NT and 95... three reboots and all of your strange vxd problems go away, and NT suddenly remembers it has a kernel somewhere on disk. If it doesn't work, recompile it.

    Arrggh.

    /Geoff
  • Right Arm Dude! Power to the persons!?!
    No, really I like Slack. I learned on
    it and am just more comfortable with it.
    And yea, RedHat is EASY to install.
  • How the heck are we supposed to take advantage of the last early-bird discount day when the friggin servers are being moved? That sounds like a severe lack of planning. The woman that answered the questions # didn't even know the servers were down or being moved. Thanks RedHat!!!
  • Sheesh... read it... he SAYS he's joking!
    It was a good joke too!

    Man.
  • Hummm... 12:30 to 2:04. So, they were down for an hour and a half. Worse than I would expect, but still not bad for a major company move. Had they been running NT, it'd probably take that long just to reboot the servers... ;-)

    So, what are you whining about?

  • Missed it the first time, but rtc is Real Time Clock, I don't have it listed myself, so did you compile the RTC into your kernel either as a component or a module?
    Time flies like an arrow;
  • This is so news-worthy, it shouldn't be burried in a thread... You hear that Cmdr Taco, this needs to be it's own topic heading!!!!
    Time flies like an arrow;

  • Whine (Score:1)

    by Noke ( 8971 )
    ... It seems to be what the linux/slashdot community does best.
  • freshmeat.net is hosted by RedHat
    (not just the software, their actual servers)
    You don't spend much time at Freshmeat, do you?
  • Oh I see....people don't have time to read a relevant mailing list but they do find time to log into /. and post complaints on 5-6 topics a day.

    I see...

    Thanks for clearing that up.

  • The smtp protocol is fairly rebust, and includes specs for retrying. I think it goes something like 1 minute, 5 minutes, 15 minutes, 1 hour, each hour for 24 hours, once per day.
    Fatal error on the fifth day.
    Or something like that. Mail should just be delayed, not bounce, well, unless you send your mail by
    telnet redhat.com 25
    HELO
    etc.
    :-)
  • This was announced on the GNOME front page, the first news item on Wednesday. It was planned for yesterday (the move) I think, but it was announced at least on the gnome-mailing list that it would be done for a few hours today instead.
  • I don't even see why this is worth posting too. Who cares? Freshmeat will be back up, its nothing to whine about. Redhat just made a dumb move. Its not going to change anyone's opinion of redhat, if you don't like it, you'll stay that way and if you like the fact that they make linux so easy my mom could install it then this isn't going to change anyones opinion right?

    Install a real Distro-- Go slackware.
    Flame away.
  • more FUD from the MS propaganda machine. great reporting, using a web browser as your source.
  • Oh yeah, them movers love working at night.

    dar "Not a slave to fashion."
  • ">By the way, I'm just kidding. ;-)"

    Calm down. That means he didn't really see it. Neither did I, and I looked. In fact, I found a story about NT2000. Fairly nice to MS, till the end, where the author said a Unix-type server would already do it all, for far less cost.

  • > Cololocations are by far the worst of
    > all connections to run a business from.

    I beg to differ! :>

    > First of all you have no power to control your > network.

    Most decent coloc facilities allow you 24/7 access to the facility. Most control of a network can be done remotely, anyway.

    > Secondly, you are relying on the company's
    > technical support. I don't care how many master > switches /rebooting devices you have if a

    Console servers, remote power boot, spanning tree, and other methods _DO_ work quite well.

    > Colocations are for small time people.

    Small time? :> Like Yahoo, gamespot.com, talkcity.com, quote.com?

    -Kysh, a Debian user :>
  • You would think that RedHat going off-line is the equivalent of nuclear catastrophe!

    They announced it in advance in the proper location for such announcements (yes, Virginia, that would be their mailing list) and are pretty much sticking to their game plan.

    Ferchrissakes, its not going to harm "the movement". Relax, have a drink, do a downer...whatever. Downtime is NOT the end of the world..as long as its scheduled. Try that with an NT network

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