"Anthere" <anthere6(a)yahoo.com> wrote in
message news:20030920125847.92054.qmail@web41708.mail.yahoo.com...
Thinking about it...when Wikipedia was down
yesterday,
only the english wikipedia displayed a red message
saying it was not editable, but allowed read only.
On the french wikipedia, it was just and that was all.
No warning message saying "well, guys, sorry, we are
trying to fix the stuff" and not even read-only
wikipedia.
I don't know if this is due to the existence of the
two servers and if it would have been possible that
the fr wikipedia be read only as well.
If it is possible, could it be that we switch to read
only mode and alert message as well, instead of just
letting people wondering why the whole site is not
working at all ?
Sorry if I just don't understand the organisation of
that at all. I just think it is real bad that people
just don't know what is going on.
Unfortunately there was nothing I could do about that. We could display an
error message on en: because the requests for en: web pages go to larousse,
and larousse was working fine. The database was on pliny, and that server
was not responding.
Requests for web pages on the other-language wikis go straight to pliny, not
via another webserver. If I had root access (and assuming I also had some
vague understanding of linux networking), I might have been able to pull an
IP aliasing trick like Brion did last time larousse went down. That involves
making larousse pretend to be pliny. I imagine Brion would have attempted
that if he had more time.
Soon, the other-language webserving will also be moved to larousse, which is
fine as long as larousse doesn't crash.
-- Tim Starling <t=starling=physics=unimelb=edu=au>