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Red Hat Software Businesses

Hurricane Floyd Shuts Red Hat Down Temporarily 86

Posted by CmdrTaco from the ladies-and-gentleman-we-have-craziness dept.
I've received notes from a few different places that Red Hat will be taking down its onsite servers for the duration of the Hurricane Floyd. The staff is leaving at 3 today and the place will be closed on Thursday. If Floyd doesn't cause any serious problems the web and ftp servers (as well as the *@redhat.com email addresses) will come back up soon by friday. Update: 09/15 01:01 by CT : FTP and WWW are mirrored offsite, and assuming DNS propogates properly service should continue without problems.
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Hurricane Floyd Shuts Red Hat Down Temporarily More

Hurricane Floyd Shuts Red Hat Down Temporarily

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  • Communications lines are fairly sturdy. Your thinking of an 'E' bomb.
  • Speaking from an alternate viewpoint (as always):

    Many of my most problematic (both their fault and ours)customers (I do tech support) reside in Florida. With the widespread precautionary evacuations, our office has been able to claw out from under a heap of accumulated backwork because the phones have fallen mercifully silent.

    I don't suppose Hurricane Gert can be Slashdotted into heading towards Florida and prolong the serenity of the Help Desk floor?

    (Disclaimer: Not wishing widspread havoc on anyone except a select few customers who, by their very nature, don't know who I'm referring to *whistles innocently*)

    Rafe
    V^^^^V
  • :)
    I am sorry for spouting off then.

    Steve Ruyle
  • Um no, Visual Basic is so easy, it shouldn't even count as a language. Ive had days where I have had a hangover, and I can still do Visual Basic and SQL....and I think the storm should take a detour....so there :-) I dont think we're in kansas anymore to-to!
  • Some of you may have heard reports of Hurricane "Gert" following in Floyd's dread path. IGNORE this false report! That is simply COMMUNIST PROPAGANDA! Hurricanes are natural. Any statistical analysis will show that this year's hurricane average is actually below average. GO BACK TO WORK! KEEP LOOKING DOWN! STOP TALKING!

  • No secondary systems or disaster recovery plan (Score:3)

    by EndyRap ( 91892 ) on Wednesday September 15, 1999 @07:53AM (#1680337)
    According to RedHat's SEC filings: (emphasis mine)

    "Substantially all of our communications hardware and our other computer hardware operations related to our Web site are located in Herndon, Virginia. Fire, floods, HURRICANES, tornadoes, earthquakes, power loss, telecommunications failures, break-ins and similar events could damage these systems."
    ...
    "Our insurance policies may not adequately compensate us for any losses that may occur due to failures or interruptions in our systems. WE DO NOT PRESENTLY HAVE ANY SECONDARY "OFF-SITE" SYSTEMS OR A FORMAL DISASTER RECOVERY PLAN."

    RedHat SEC filing is he re [sec.gov]. (page 13)

  • And yeah, verily did the prophets of RedHat predict that there would soon be a great wind in the upcoming year:

    Red Hat Linux 5.0 (Hurricane) Login: _

  • We wanted to set up a webcam, but power to most of the building was turned off, so we get to just ping the router to see if things are up. :)
  • people THINK that indutrialization is responsible, the fact is that the temperature of the earth varies quite significantly. There have been several large varriations of temperatures in the past century. There were many large storms in the 50-60, then it slowed down, and now its going back up. The coldest time recorded i believe was in the mid 1850's. The net difference since 1850 is several degrees, but i doubt its that significant compared to the last 10,000 years. It is possible that in 100 years there may be fear of global cooling (guess who the enviromentalists will blame that on).

    The global warming is happening, however nobody has yet proven it is a result of industrialization, its just environmentalists have made you believe this.

    We have to reduce pollution, but we shouldn't do it in a knee jurk reaction to "global warming" at the cost of many peoples jobs.
  • Isn't this fantastic? This really is the first time I have seen the "de-centralized" property of the Internet in action.

    Back when ARPA-net was designed, important data was mirrored accross the country in the event of an atomic explosion. I wonder if there is a market for such a "Emergancy Mirroring Service." I am suprised the insurance companies aren't all over this one already!

    -AP
  • someone send that to microsoft...hehe
    JediLuke
  • You IDIOT!!! They are 120 miles INLAND!!!
  • I recall reading somewhere (and I could be mistaken) of a scientific study that showed more and more hurricanes are going to swing up and hit the east coast instead of swing under or over florida. I believe the culprit was global warming (which is caused by industrialization, which appears to be more concentrated in the northeast).
  • Would you risk that much equipment in 90+ MPH winds?
  • We measure the times between power outages with our NetWare 4.11 server. (The UPS shuts it down after 5 mins without power).

    The best our power company has done so far is 197 days. I wasn't happy.

    Incidentally, the server is grossly over-specified for the job. It's a Dell PowerEdge 233Mhz box with ~40GB of disk and 384MB RAM. It serves 50 users so fast that they don't know it's there. It's unusual to see processor usage go over 3%. I like NetWare.

  • Re:Red Roof? (Score:3)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 15, 1999 @04:26AM (#1680350)
    ...boxing up desktops and stuff so that if the roof blows off the building, they can relocate the office quickly.

    Ahh, an investment of time and effort now, could save them time and money later. I'm from Charleston, SC, and I've never seen a company move their computers to a safer place. I'm impressed that Red Hat is thinking ahead so well. I made good money after Hugo setting-up new machines. So many people leave their computers on the floor and/or near a window. The most serious preparation I've seen so far, is placing the computers on desks in case of flooding. Unfortunately, downtown Charleston is only 7 feet!! above sea level. I'm still sitting in my office in Charleston, and my company wasn't thoughtful enough to box up computers. Hell, they weren't even thoughtful enough to close. "Customers are more important than rain...," so says the PWB. I parked my car in the middle of the the second floor of a parking garage near King, and I'm getting a little worried about it now because lots of things are starting to blow around. Well, if the power goes out and our propane-powered generator blows off of the top of the building, then I get to leave (or go hide), because the computers and the phone system won't work.

  • Mailing lists are not being mirrored.
    Christopher A. Bohn
  • we don't have hurricanes...and earthquakes are few and far between...come to Sunny CALIFORNIA!
    JediLuke
  • I'm surprised that not more people sees the storm as just another ploy from RedHat to become the next M$;-)
  • "people THINK that indutrialization is responsible, the fact is that the temperature of the earth varies quite significantly. There have been several large varriations of temperatures in the past century. There were many large storms in the 50-60, then it slowed down, and now its going back up. The coldest time recorded i believe was in the mid 1850's. The net difference since 1850 is several degrees, but i doubt its that significant compared to the last 10,000 years. It is possible that in 100 years there may be fear of global cooling (guess who the enviromentalists will blame that on). "


    What has happened in the last 100 or 200 or even 500 years is, for the most part, unimportant. People need to start thinking on a much longer-term time scale than their considerably short lives. The global warming problem is important in this respect. The problems with global warming models occur on time spans of several 100's to 1000's of years. What's would happen in the next 50 or 100 years is irrelevent. This is why it is important to assume that "global warming" theory is correct, even if it is hogwash. Only now, at basically the beginning, do we stand a reasonable chance of determing an outcome that may not be realized for several hundred years. If we can act in a way that would logically benefit the future, is it not our responsibility to do so? In all reality, is does not make sense to spend 20-100 years arguing about the data when the time to act is now. The only thing that could happen as a result of immediate action is a better world.
  • Red Hat also hosts the GNOME.org site, which does appear to be down at this time. (There may be mirror sites, but DNS has not been set up to send you there automatically.)
  • Taking down non-essential machines leaves more backup power juice (generic technical term for batteries and gasoline ;-) for the essential machines. And there's no guarantee that we'll have an internet connection, let alone sufficient juice, for the duration of the storm. That's why we have distributed important services like ftp and web service.

    Electricity in these parts is not highly reliable; our UPSs seem to scream in protest about once a week, and every few months someone drives into a power pole and, whoops, there goes the power for an hour or three... There are few buried power lines except for the last distribution stage, so the whole infrastructure is extremely fragile. This situtation took me by surprise when I moved to NC from the midwest (MN and WI), where nearly all the power is buried and a power loss is something to write home about.

    Time to go kick myself again for not buying a generator for home when they were relatively cheap. Maybe they'll be cheap again after Y2K fizzles. :-)

  • Heard on the net, in an uptime war thread, first talk about NT, then talk about Unix, then a guy piped up with a call he'd had recently to replace a disk in a company's NetWare server, the apps disk went down, but nobody in the company knew where the server was, the tech finally found it by tracing cables in the ceiling, the poor server was buried in the back of a stockroom, and had been up for slightly over five *years*, still running NetWare 2.15.....
  • Well, this is great. I waited and waited to get a power backup for my Linux server, and now I'm kicking myself for not getting one yet. Because I'm in New Jersey, I'm not getting as much of the hurricane as RedHat is, so it's not worth it for me to shut down the server completely 'till the storm is over. But if it does lose power, I'll be pretty pissed.

  • Wish them luck (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Maybe Floyd should do a detour through Redmond, as well..

  • Red Roof? (Score:4)

    by Mur! ( 19589 ) on Wednesday September 15, 1999 @03:11AM (#1680362) Journal
    A friend of mine works tech support at Red Hat, and they spent yesterday shutting down and boxing up desktops and stuff so that if the roof blows off the building, they can relocate the office quickly.

    Why is this a possible problem? Apparently, Red Hat's roof is only rated up to sustained winds of 60mph. Considering the last forcast put us at winds of 80+ mph when it hits the Triangle, it might take a little extra time for Red Hat to get things rolling again. I hope they *have* someplace to relocate to.

  • Ah well (Score:2)

    by rde ( 17364 )
    Some of those support guys had uptime measured in months. Too bad. Now that they're down, though, some of the older ones can be upgraded. Penguin mints are just the thing.
  • I don't blame them for boarding up and getting out of there for Floyd, but wouldn't it have been possible to server their webpage and other services off of another machine - they do have other offices, right?

  • network availability (Score:3)

    by netpuppy ( 77874 ) on Wednesday September 15, 1999 @03:11AM (#1680365) Homepage
    From a network engineering viewpoint, I am completely enchanted with the idea that we can build networks that will be available to online communities regardless of little inconveniences like category 4 hurricanes.

    It stands as proof of the importance of the work that the geek community is doing that systems are regularly put into place that will withstand natural disasters. If this stuff wasn't important, companies wouldn't go to the lenghts that they do to make sure their web sites are up regardless of natural disasters and rogue backhoes. Here's to internet resiliency (assuming, of course, that the 'NIC doesn't screw up RedHat's zone propagation ... :)

  • MY company (Score:2)

    by Anonymous Coward
    My company did something I'm very proud of - They shipped a bunch of volunteers from Tech Support in our Orlando office, and set them up in temporary office space in California, to assure service continuity.

    This is responsible business practice.
    If you call my company, and get through to tech support, then you probably know what company I'm talking about. Tho I'm posting anonymously, because I'm not sure if it's kosher to make this public knowlege, tho I'm not sure why it wouldn't be. Our company is a little paranoid about stuff like this.
  • Scratch, scratch. Yeah I do remember this happening.
    M$ Spokesperson -
    Lightning and hail cause the server to loose power. Yeah that's our story and we're sticking by it.

    Ok not quite the same thing, but still...

  • PR Fodder (Score:3)

    by _Sprocket_ ( 42527 ) on Wednesday September 15, 1999 @03:10AM (#1680369)
    News release from RedHat Marketing:

    "Some companies loose their services because of a thunderstorm - it takes a major hurricane to shut down RedHat!"

    :)

  • WebCam! (Score:3)

    by malice95 ( 40013 ) <Michael.Cunningham.USA @ g m ail.com> on Wednesday September 15, 1999 @03:12AM (#1680370)
    Comeone RedHat! where's the balls.. At least set
    up a webcam for us poor smucks in the northeast
    to check this thing out:) J/K

    Go home.. board up.. Hope everything stays safe
    down there. Can't have my favorite distro and its
    staff washed out to sea can we.

    Malice95
  • The internic used to require (or perhaps just strongly advise) that there be nameservers for each domain in separate geographical locations, with separate internet feeds. Seems like that would have been a good idea at a time like this.
  • Yes, and we all cherish our uptimes :)

    My friend refuses to update his kernel because of his...of course, if I had a 160+day uptime I'd hate to reboot too...
    (Just outta curiosity, is it even possible for that other os to stay up for 5+ months?)

    Anyways, back on topic. I think I'd rather kill my uptime than come back to find the server dead (physically)

  • the internet was built to survive the a-bomb... (Score:3)

    by jhoffmann ( 42839 ) on Wednesday September 15, 1999 @03:19AM (#1680375) Homepage
    but hurricanes pack quite a bit more power than even atomic bombs. you gotta love mother nature.
  • I tried to find the article I read. In a quick search of the web, it appears that global warming will cause more intense storms. It also appears that El Nino causes less hurricanes to form in the Atlantic. Here are some links.

    http://www.usc.edu/org/seagrant/elnino/
    http://typhoon.atmos.colostate.edu/forecasts/199 6/hurr_apr96/node6.html
    http://www.disasterrelief.org/Disasters/980728la nina/
    http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/1998/hurricanes .html

    Fascinating information. How we are changing the planet without having much control over what we are doing.
  • backup.

    in a word, this is yet another benefit of open source. think of it - how many places does nt and other microsoft source exist? the latest redhat sources are her in ireland. they're all over the usa, europe, australia...

    in fact depending on what the shuttle astronauts took up with them the source to linux (debian) was even in space.

    so even if the redhat office gets washed away, redhat development can keep going. the same is true for any gpl'ed linux distro.

  • Microsoft "FUD" to follow? :-) (Score:3)

    by Linux Freak ( 18608 ) on Wednesday September 15, 1999 @04:43AM (#1680378) Homepage
    Reuters(tm): "A spokeswoman for Microsoft said that Red Hat's outage is proof that Linux should not be considered stable and reliable. 'Microsoft servers, located on the West Coast, will continue to operate normally throughout the duration of this storm'."
  • It really is quite unexpected for a Goddess to be so uninformed... I have seen hurricanes on the Texas coast do considerable damage to Dallas, which is 400 miles inland... and this storm is bigger than the entire state of Texas.

    Floyd shows the possibility of being a much larger storm than we have seen on this continent at any time this century, has the potential for doing great damage quite some ways inland. They have chosen a most responsible option.

    Yes its down to cat4 now, but after 2 days in the warm waters of the gulf stream?? who knows...

    Steve Ruyle
  • Umm... learn your history a little better there buddy. The Internet was designed to survive going down due to nuclear attack. That doesn't mean the nuked nodes would survive. It means the rest of the network would continue to function despite those resources being off-line.

    With respect to Chicago going down due to a cable cut, the Internet only promises that the rest of the network will continue to function without Chicago. Don't blame the Internet, blame the backhoe operator.

  • Hurricane Fran. AQ
  • Well, Red Hat may have packed up and gone elsewhere, but I decided to stick it out. Not much going on yet (10:00 PM). A lot of flooding. We are supposed to get slammed around midnight. I was without power for a couple of hours, but as soon as it came back on I was visiting my favorite page. Do I get a t-shirt for that or something? Anyway, I'll probably be in the dark in a few hours, winds are starting to pick up. But I'll be bcak to check out the latest geek news in a few days. Wish us luck
  • with all the money there getting from the stock, you would think they would have a decent building that has a strong roof. Specially were they are and all these hurricanes.
  • It is possible to harden electronics against EMP. In fact, a mild hardening is always done on all long-haul power and phone lines since solar flares can produce the same effect, but at a much lower level. Both caused induced currents in conductor loops, but nuclear explosion EMPs have a far shorter 'rise' time than solar flares, and IIRC it's this rapid rise time, not the total power delivered, that causes problems to unhardened electronics.
  • Here's a neat clip from RedHat's site:

    Priority Mobile Health
    Michael Boatright, CEO

    For Priority Mobile Health, an emergency service provider, Red Hat Linux turned out to be hurricane proof. During Hurricane Georges, Mobile Health's NT server crashed and the Red Hat Linux server took up the slack. Before long, the Red Hat server was also carrying local government offices, giving them a Web site to post vital weather information, warnings and road closings that received thousands of hits during the hurricane. Not bad for a Pentium 133 on Red Hat Linux.

    See, Red Hat should have nothing to fear. Good luck guys, and hope all turns out for the best!
  • If you're into the hurricane stuff, check out the homepage of the local (to Wilmington, NC, USA) NBC affiliate, WECT [wect.com]. They link to three area webcams [wect.com]: one on the Wilmington waterfront and two at Wrightsville Beach. (Click the "WECT live cams" link.)

    All I've got to say is that I'm glad I'm at college in the mountains and not at home in Wilmington...

  • The ozone hole is now shrinking and should be fully recovered in around 75 years at the current rate, as technology continues to improve it will be at an accelerated rate

    Technology is not to blame, it is what will ultimatly help. At this time technology somethimes involves pollution, but in the long run it will help

    I do agree that we have to look towards the long term, but what do we do if the earth starts to naturally cool?

    Anyway, the hurricans have to do with la nina or whatever it's called

  • What more can I say? Id expect that a company like Red Hat had its Servers co-located at some type of data-processing-center environment and not in their local basement.
  • In the lond term, the earth is actually beginning what should be a warming trend (in the glacial/interglacial sense). This "should" happen over periods on the order of 10-50 thousand years (or more in some cases). We just need to ask what we are doing, that is unrelated to natural processes, to speed up the trend. When this question has been answered (personally I think it has), then the time to act is now.
  • Actually, Red Hat is currently leasing their building. They moved to their current location in Durham months before their IPO. And I imagine they'd rather use their IPO dollars to open their west coast and europe offices than to spend extra money relocating in the Triangle a second time in a year. Besides, a day's downtime and the time spent packing up machines costs *far* less, I'm sure, than finding new office space in the Triangle, and moving again.
  • the 'net itself was supposed to survive nuclear war, but it has taken some serious engineering feats to allow connectivity to individual web presences when their primary services go down. BGP, Dual-homing to different ISPs, geographic redundancy (and all the routing joys involved with that), content replication, etc. etc.

    I recall there was a mudslide or storm in California 3 or 4 years back, and the whole world was shocked when they found out that all the silicon valley companies were only single homed to the internet ... 'cause most isps lost service to the area. It was a bad wakeup call for some people, and companies are beginning to design their own networks differently ...

    of course, the chicago board of trade's recent problems with MCI prove that people haven't entirely gotten the idea of resilient networks into their heads yet.


  • I'm here at IBM-RTP, where we will *also* be closing up tomorrow.. no, it's not all of IBM, but it *is* the single largest IBM site on the planet, as well as being manufacturing for all of IBM PC (servers, desktops, etc)
  • the internet can and will survive anything... it's just a matter of whether or not the hardware is still around to manifest it physically...
  • Why dont they just DNS to another site? You wouldnt even know they were down. We have a huge data center in JAX and everything went smoothly here after evac.
    ~4.5mill and they cant set up a second office ;)
    -Kris
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • A hurricane can take out communications for an entire section of the country. An A Bomb can take out a city. You guess which one can take out communications wide scale.. ;-P
  • >My friend refuses to update his kernel because
    >of his...of course, if I had a 160+day uptime
    >I'd hate to reboot too...
    >(Just outta curiosity, is it even possible for
    >that other os to stay up for 5+ months?)

    I had an easy 130+ days on a heavy loaded server recently and had to shut it down because of .... A FAULTY UPS *ARGH!*

  • I can see the article now. (Score:5)

    by Amphigory ( 2375 ) on Wednesday September 15, 1999 @03:28AM (#1680402) Homepage
    *For the record, this is a hoax and not an actual article*

    YDNet, Raleigh NC. - Many analysts expressed continued concerns today over the reliability of the Linux operating system. This operating system has recently made in-roads into the server market with support from major companies such as IBM.

    However, it appears that, along with it's lack of multi-processor support and poor performance serving static web pages, the operating system lacks another feature required for the enterprise market: the ability to withstand a category 4 hurricane.

    This problem came to light today as Redhat software prepared for Hurricane Floy by shutting down all computers at the Redhat site. This stand in sharp contrast to Microsoft's Windows 2000 operating system, which is currently being modified to better withstand large storms (see www.windows2000test.com). Analysts agree that Microsoft has more experience experience in recovering from this type of failure than any other enterprise operating system vendor.

    Fred Foolish, an MCSE in the Raleigh area, was heard to say "Yeah... Maybe Linux is enough for a small company, but for companies that need to withstand more than a light sprinkle, enterprise class reliability is needed".

    Fred Mud at Microsoft agreed. "One of the best features of our high-value proposition product, Microsoft Windows 2000,software is its ability to quickly recover from storms. Microsoft has a lot of experience in the area of post-storm recover " Mud also dismissed the announcement that most redhat.com services would continue, noting that it is generally agreed by enterprise analysts that Linux still needs to work on Enterprise Class features like clustering, saying "It's just impossible I tell you!"

    Redhat software was not reached for comment at their Bahamas office in time for this story.
  • good job for floyd.. i mean i get to miss school tommorow because of it!! Of coarse it blows that all the redhat folks won't get to go on the redhat site, but I'm a slackware guy anyway. I just hope my power doesn't go out, my linux box will not be happy with me.
    char *stupidsig = "this is my dumb sig";
  • Oh, I know quite well what damage can be done, as I live, quite literally, down the street from RedHat. We have seen quite a few storms come through here, 120 miles inland. My only point was to respond to this:

    Re:WebCam! (Score:-1, Troll)
    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 15, @09:15AM EDT (#17)

    be their own fault for setting up shop close to the ocean, morons

    And inform this person that they aren't that close to the ocean.

    (My previous comment makes no sense without the Troll's original comment.)

  • "Only wimps use tape backup: _real_ men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it ;)"
    -- Linus Torvalds
  • If they'd left even a couple of low-priority machines up and running and they stayed up the whole time, they coulda said "Linux: The O/S that can withstand a Hurricane". It's a no-lose bet either, because if the storm took them out no one could blame the O/S.
  • This is getting out-of-hand. This post was tagged as a "troll" just now. Can whoever moderated it, in your infinite wisdom (or, more probably, complete lack thereof) tell the rest of us *why*?

    It would seem that moderator priviledges are being given out to trained monkeys now.

    - A.P.
    --


    "One World, one Web, one Program" - Microsoft promotional ad

  • If the building's trashed, they're not going to stay up or be able to come back up after the storm roars through. This is a CYA, let's keep things as "up" as possible throughout the the situation.

    It makes a LOT of sense, what they did...
  • Hey, a hurricane is coming? Wait a second, I think I know what that meens . . . . . . no school!!! Yippeee!
  • Whether /. users love or hate RedHat, I think we can all agree that we hope that everyone in the area gets out alive.

    Usually I'm a cynical bastard, but hurricanes tend to humble me a little.

  • read the update on the article .... www and ftp mirrored off site / waiting for DNS prop / etc.


  • Dude...the Electromagnetic Wave would ruin electronics on a wide scale...rendering them as usless as a pile of rubble...

    JediLuke
  • Well, their stock is up 2 points, so I'm guessing it's OK.. ;-P
  • Communications lines are fairly sturdy. Your thinking of an 'E' bomb.

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