Windows Updated

Uptime

For the final project in a class I am taking we had to build a web-based disk storage system with a REST XML API, basically like Amazon S3 but at much smaller scale. The assignment was pretty cool because it was very open-ended: our servers just had to register their URLs with the professor's server and allow him to store data blocks. How we actually did it (OS, language, etc) was completely up to us.

I decided to just run my server on a computer at home, which is what most people did. I figured it would work out fine. My biggest worry was that Comcast would block a port or go down and screw me over. Fortunately that didn't happen, but there were other problems.

For about two weeks my server ran perfectly with 100% uptime, but the professor only started monitoring uptime and availability this Tuesday. Of course, on Tuesday afternoon there was a power outage at home, and my computer didn't turn back on until I got home from work and found it. I have my main computer hooked up to a UPS so it didn't go down, but the other computer was running in a closet with no UPS. Lesson learned: always have a battery backup when homework points are at stake. Also, set all computers to reboot themselves automatically after a power loss.

After I booted it back up I figured it was OK and went to bed. Of course, this happened to be the second Tuesday of the month, so Windows Update downloaded a bunch of patches overnight and rebooted, taking out the server. My process failed to start on reboot, so I had another outage all night. Normally I always set updates to "notify only" and never "automatic", but in this one case I left it on automatic, figuring that it wouldn't matter too much since it was a closet-computer that I wouldn't even log into regularly. Lesson learned: never ever ever leave the updates on automatic, they'll always find a way to screw you at the wrong time. Also, test to make sure the service comes back up properly after a reboot.

Larger-scale, I guess I learned about the importance of having geographically distributed datacenters and automatic failover, but that wasn't really a practical option in this case.

Fortunately most of the other students in the class also suffered outages as well (see graph above), so I don't think my grade will be impacted too much.

Posted on March 14, 2008
Comments (8) Trackbacks (0)
  1. What if you didn’t want to or couldn’t run a server from home? Technically, it’s probably against the terms of service you signed with Comcast or pretty much any other ISP besides Speakeasy. It seems lame to base your grade off the idiocy of Comcast or PSE, but I guess thems the breaks.

  2. Yeah that was sort of an interesting question. UW did not really provide servers where we could run our programs. There was some talk that you could run them on lab computers and hope that your process didn’t get killed by the admin, but that was not really a workable solution.
    Some other people already had paid hosting for their own websites, which they used for this instead of running them at home. I’m not aware of anybody that actually paid for something new just to be able to do this assignment, but that would suck if you had to do that.

  3. So…what did your prof say about the other outages? And is this project a big percentage of your grade for the course?

  4. I’m not sure what’ll happen about that – the professor hasn’t posted the grades yet. I expect it should be a pretty small part of the grade, though, so I’m not too worried.

  5. do you still have that program where you could make windows transparent?

  6. Yeah I still have that. You want it? I can probably dig it up when I get home.

  7. i actually did want it lol.

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