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The Engine Imbalance is What Caused the Worm-Hole in the First Place
by Aaron Smith on Monday, July 27 2009If ever there was an indication of our societal need for constant and immediate information, it was this weekend when our server blackout caused a frenzy of panic amongst a handful of GW Micro consumers. Once requests to gwmicro.com started timing out, the rumours started flying. Was there sort of abnormal weather phenomena that caused an electricity shortage? Did someone forget to pay the power bill? Had GW Micro been bought out? Was it swine flu? An act of terrorism? Were we hacked? Are we under attack from an unknown alien entity? Was it Armageddon? Please tell me it wasn't Armageddon! When you find out the underlying cause of our outage, you're going to be fairly disappointed with the lack of thrill and excitement of the whole event. As you now know (reading this is a dead give-away), the GW Micro servers breathe life once again. Truth be told, we're pretty proud of our little corner of the Internet. We're completely self hosted, from email, to web, to FTP, to DNS and more, with complex routing tables designed to maximize connectivity and throughput. We have a melting pot of hardware including a small array of modems and switches, and systems that range from a trusty AMD K6-2 400 to a temperamental Intel Dual-Quad Core. We run various flavors of operating systems, such as Fedora Linux and 64-bit Windows Server 2008 with drive redundancy and a comparable backup routine. And we have the entire architecture jacked in to a sweet little power grid with a WAN connection for remote controlling on/off state of any connected device. We do well for an office of 17 people, and a customer base of countless numbers. What we don't have (or didn't have until this morning) is a good handle on what should be plugged into the UPS. That's right. The entire disruption of access to all GW Micro resources boils down to a single word: overload. I won't go into the details of how someone decided the battery backup was a good place to hook up a couple of Braillers, or why the monitor, of all things, was suckling away at our electron flow. No, blame is not the appropriate avenue to reconciliation. Truth be told, the UPS being used was just under the red line of maximum capacity to begin with. So older and wiser we grow, and as of around 3:00pm this afternoon, we're protected by a significantly larger backup unit. See, I told you it wasn't very exciting.
