Re: Yet another infrastructure problem

On Thu, Oct 30, 2008 at 12:42 PM, Andrew Sullivan <ajs(at)crankycanuck(dot)ca> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 29, 2008 at 09:15:20PM -0700, Joshua D. Drake wrote:
>>
>> And is actually a hardware issue that is being dealt with, not a software
>> one.
>
> I fail totally to see how either that, or the OS in question, in any
> way constitutes a premise against Greg's argument.

He raised the issue of the Jabber server (and some other services) in
response to a comment on how we've (once) seen a FreeBSD jail hog
resources and adversely affect another.

> His argument is
> just that there are a lot of services, and several of them appear, to
> the uneducated eye, to be rather less reliable than one might hope.

Right - and as far as I'm aware, pretty much all of those issues boil
down to what a couple of days ago was thought to be two hardware
issues. 1 of them definitely is (the Linux based Jabber server) which
CP staff (or JD) are apparently migrating to new hardware, the other
is now looking like a kernel bug that manifests itself on certain
hardware configurations which is hopefully now resolved as well.

> He has proposed a way to help: increase diversity of the systems by
> introducing another operating system and some additional hardware.

Aside from not having additional hardware, running multiple OSs itself
adds significant management overhead as I'm sure you realise - in a
project where volunteers to handle the day to day tasks rarely last
more than a week, that's something thats difficult to justify to the
few of us that do continue to do the work on an ongoing basis.

Further, it reduces our ability to re-deploy services quickly where
ever we like (though granted that would be offset somewhat by having
more machines). We would need to ensure that our OSs were equally well
spread out geographically to ensure we could redeploy any service in
any data center as we currently can (and, on occasion, do).

I guess what I'm saying is that whilst in an ideal world we'd have
diverse OS's, different hardware for all services, and even different
data centers for each, in reality it just isn't practical for us.

--
Dave Page
EnterpriseDB UK: http://www.enterprisedb.com