Re: Yet another infrastructure problem

Magnus Hagander wrote:
> Greg Sabino Mullane wrote:
>   
>> People have been complaining on IRC that nothing can be
>> downloaded from our site, as the mirror-picking script throws
>> an internal error.
>>
>> When are we going to fix our infrastructure properly?
>>     
>
> As Stefan has already posted on this very list, he is performing
> maintenance on that machine in order to move it to new hardware.
>
> //Magnus
>
>   
We are still missing the one important thing "Notification"  lots and
lots of people use the website that will never go near the lists, irc or
anything else.  Notifying the email lists of downtime will stop the
heavily involved community from complaining, but it does absolutely
nothing for general user trying to download something from the internet.

You can argue about replication, downtime and the like until you are
blue in the face.  There will always be some downtime.  The question is
how do people know about it, when is it and what do they do about it?

Until reading this thread I had never even thought about how PostgreSQL
does or doesn't notify people about downtime or potential downtime. 
Reading down thread this notification issue appears to have been
ignored.  To me it seems like relatively low hanging fruit to allow
messages to be posted on the website about planned outages, and
notifications of recent unplanned outages.  Complaining on IRC is one of
the only ways to find out what's going on at the moment for a casual
user.  When Marc's hosting had trouble a couple of years back, the only
way to find out anything was on irc.

I'd look into this, but I'd need a lot more knowledge about how the web
stuff is setup, and I'm probably not going to be able to glean that from
people in a couple of weeks.  But if I can.  Great!.

Russell.