<link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/</link>
+ <item>
+ <title>12 years of outages - summarised by Stuart Kendrick</title>
+ <link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/12_years_of_outages___summarised_by_Stuart_Kendrick.html</link>
+ <guid isPermaLink="true">http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/12_years_of_outages___summarised_by_Stuart_Kendrick.html</guid>
+ <pubDate>Fri, 26 Oct 2012 14:20:00 +0200</pubDate>
+ <description><p>I work at the <a href="http://www.uio.no/">University of Oslo</a>
+looking after the computers, mostly on the unix side, but in general
+all over the place. I am also a member (and currently leader) of
+<a href="http://www.nuug.no/">the NUUG association</a>, which in turn
+make me a member of <a href="http://www.usenix.org/">USENIX</a>. NUUG
+is an member organisation for us in Norway interested in free
+software, open standards and unix like operating systems, and USENIX
+is a US based member organisation with similar targets. And thanks to
+these memberships, I get all issues of the great USENIX magazine
+<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login">;login:</a> in the
+mail several times a year. The magazine is great, and I read most of
+it every time.</p>
+
+<p>In the last issue of the USENIX magazine ;login:, there is an
+article by <a href="http://www.skendric.com/">Stuart Kendrick</a> from
+Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center titled
+"<a href="https://www.usenix.org/publications/login/october-2012-volume-37-number-5/what-takes-us-down">What
+Takes Us Down</a>" (longer version also
+<a href="http://www.skendric.com/problem/incident-analysis/2012-06-30/What-Takes-Us-Down.pdf">available
+from his own site</a>), where he report what he found when he
+processed the outage reports (both planned and unplanned) from the
+last twelve years and classified them according to cause, time of day,
+etc etc. The article is a good read to get some empirical data on
+what kind of problems affect a data centre, but what really inspired
+me was the kind of reporting they had put in place since 2000.<p>
+
+<p>The centre set up a mailing list, and started to send fairly
+standardised messages to this list when a outage was planned or when
+it already occurred, to announce the plan and get feedback on the
+assumtions on scope and user impact. Here is the two example from the
+article: First the unplanned outage:
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+Subject: Exchange 2003 Cluster Issues
+Severity: Critical (Unplanned)
+Start: Monday, May 7, 2012, 11:58
+End: Monday, May 7, 2012, 12:38
+Duration: 40 minutes
+Scope: Exchange 2003
+Description: The HTTPS service on the Exchange cluster crashed, triggering
+ a cluster failover.
+
+User Impact: During this period, all Exchange users were unable to
+ access e-mail. Zimbra users were unaffected.
+Technician: [xxx]
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+Next the planned outage:
+
+<blockquote><pre>
+Subject: H Building Switch Upgrades
+Severity: Major (Planned)
+Start: Saturday, June 16, 2012, 06:00
+End: Saturday, June 16, 2012, 16:00
+Duration: 10 hours
+Scope: H2 Transport
+Description: Currently, Catalyst 4006s provide 10/100 Ethernet to end-
+ stations. We will replace these with newer Catalyst
+ 4510s.
+User Impact: All users on H2 will be isolated from the network during
+ this work. Afterward, they will have gigabit
+ connectivity.
+Technician: [xxx]
+</pre></blockquote>
+
+<p>He notes in his article that the date formats and other fields have
+been a bit too free form to make it easy to automatically process them
+into a database for further analysis, and I would have used ISO 8601
+dates myself to make it easier to process (in other words I would ask
+people to write '2012-06-16 06:00 +0000' instead of the start time
+format listed above). There are also other issues with the format
+that could be improved, read the article for the details.</p>
+
+<p>I find the idea of standardising outage messages seem to be such a
+good idea that I would like to get it implemented here at the
+university too. We do register
+<a href="http://www.uio.no/tjenester/it/aktuelt/planlagte-tjenesteavbrudd/">planned
+changes and outages in a calendar</a>, and report the to a mailing
+list, but we do not do so in a structured format and there is not a
+report to the same location for unplanned outages. Perhaps something
+for other sites to consider too?</p>
+</description>
+ </item>
+
<item>
<title>Amazon steal books from customer and throw out her out without any explanation</title>
<link>http://people.skolelinux.org/pere/blog/Amazon_steal_books_from_customer_and_throw_out_her_out_without_any_explanation.html</link>
books) and <a href="http://www.archive.org/details/texts">The Internet
Archive</a> (3,641,797 books) have heaps of books without DRM, which
can read by anyone and shared with anyone.</p>
+
+<p>Update 2012-10-23: This story broke in the morning on Monday. In
+the evening after the story had spread all across the Internet, Amazon
+restored the account of the user, as reported by
+<a href="http://www.digi.no/904675/helomvending-fra-amazon">digi.no</a>
+and <a href="http://nrk.no/kultur-og-underholdning/1.8368487">NRK</a>.
+Apparently public pressure work. The story from Martin have seen
+several twitter messages per minute the last 24 hours, which is quite
+a lot, and is still drawing a lot of attention. But even when the
+account is restored, the fundamental problem still exist. I recommend
+reading two opinions from
+<a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2012/10/rights-you-have-no-right-to-your-ebooks/index.htm">Simon
+Phipps</a> and
+<a href="http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2012/10/is-amazon-playing-fair/index.htm">Glen
+Moody</a> if you want to learn more about the fundamentals and more
+details about the original story.</p>
</description>
</item>
you see a surveillance camera? I do not. Do you feel safe when you
leave electronic traces of your behaviour and opinions? I do not. I
just remember <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon">the
-Panopticom</a>, and can not help help to think that we are slowly
-transforming our society to a huge Panopticom on our own.</p>
+Panopticon</a>, and can not help to think that we are slowly
+transforming our society to a huge Panopticon on our own.</p>
</description>
</item>
<ul>
+<li>
+2012-10-25
+<a href="http://morgenbladet.no/debatt/2012/hvem_bor_i_tomannsboliger">Hvem bor i tomannsboliger?</a> - morgenbladet.no
+
+<li>2012-10-18
+<a href="http://morgenbladet.no/debatt/2012/postmodernisme">Postmodernisme?</a> - morgenbladet.no</li>
+
<li>2012-10-16
<a href="http://fritanke.no/index.php?page=vis_nyhet&NyhetID=8936">Sukkerpiller
-og silkehansker</a> - fritanke.no.</li>
+og silkehansker</a> - fritanke.no</li>
<li>2012-10-15
<a href="http://www.aftenbladet.no/meninger/Vitenskapelig-mobbing-3049983.html">«Vitenskapelig»
<p>Bonuslenke til deg som lurer på om det er så farlig med alternativ
behandling. Sjekk «<a href="http://whatstheharm.net/">What's the
harm</a>» for informasjon om hva som kan gå galt.</a>
+
+<p>Oppdatering 2012-10-30: Lagt inn to nye debattinnlegg publisert
+etter 2012-10-16.</p>
</description>
</item>
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