It was pretty horrible. I thought where I’d read about it and couldn’t think of any place that wasn’t down.

I went digging into what was wrong with my network. I'm deep into updating my pihole now, for better or for worse. Wish me luck!

Argh. And if you run it in Docker like I do, I have to relearn the lesson that taking down the container, losing internet, then trying to do a ‘docker pull’ is a a bad idea.

Sometimes I feel the attraction of some spyware mesh system for home networking.

That's why you run two pihole instances on independent hardware :)

This is one of a few lightweight, reliable sites where any problem makes me assume that my internet connection must somehow have gone awry.

Today it has been raining heavily, and the only reason I went to my co-working place is because I checked HN in the morning, and figured my internet was down at home because HN didn't work.

Right, HN is the site I check when I'm not sure my connection is working, because it loads so fast. It HN doesn't load, then I'm more likely to walk away from the computer than to check another site.

Time was I would use sun.com to check if the network was up. These days, like you, I use HN.

For decades now pings to yahoo.com to check connectivity have been my only direct interaction with them. If they go away or start responding to pings I could use news.ycombinator.com, but the URL is longer.

I was playing with my DNS settings and Hackernews was one of the sites I used to test. I picked the wrong day...

Ditto! It took me a while to realise my DNS settings were ok.

What percentage of HN readers are doing recreational DNS configuration at any given time?

It was terrible, had to resort to reading CLRS in the meantime.

I had to resort to lobste.rs. Still, it gave me a chance to revisit all those stories I read on HN a fortnight ago.

But why?

Time to setup up an offline rss reader. Thanks for the reminder hn - you never fail to deliver.

I suspect dang was asleep and couldn't tweet about this: https://twitter.com/HNStatus/with_replies

worst seconds of my life

I am at gmt-5. I cannot sleep, my wife is out of town, I lost mi kindle the day before yesterday and HN was down. If I turn in the lights to read a book I will not sleep for the rest of the night so I listened to our cats fighting over what I assume was some big moth as my only distraction.

Reading a book will keep you awake for the night, but staring at a screen won't?

Awww, I missed it.

The last time we had a hard drive failure, we were down for a couple days. That was early 2013.

After that, in the spirit of 'never again', Nick (kogir) set up the failover server system that we still use today. That's why you missed it tonight; you wouldn't have back then. Sorry, I guess?

Edit: by pure coincidence, Nick was in town tonight and we met up for the first time in years. Two hours later HN goes down. almost as if the server was overcome by nostalgia

Looks like a hard drive stopped working. We switched to the failover server.

Sorry everyone!

Well, that's ok... thanks for being up to fix it.

It's not an actual spinning hard drive, is it?

There is a good chance that it is (or was!) an actual spinning hard drive. Whatever it is, it lives in one of our boxes at M5 and it's in their hands for the moment.

one of our boxes at M5

Read that as MI5 and it gave a chuckle!

It was an SSD. A 1.6TB SAS3 SSD. (M5 CEO here)

If you had an auto scaling kubernetes cluster with multiple redundancies using rust and 3 JS frameworks this wouldn't happen. ;)

That being said, is the actual production infra archi for HN described somewhere ? Curious how simple it can afford to be.

We laugh at people piling layers and layers and artifacts on their sites, all in the hope of adding redundancy, handle "webscale" load, and avoid an outage (ironically increasing the chances that _something_ will break).

However, if a single hard drive crashing somewhere can cause your site to be down for minutes or hours, some non-tech people (managers, shareholders, customers) will wonder if the site is "professionnal" enough - and I can sympathize with them.

From 2018: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16076041>

We’re recently running two machines (master and standby) at M5 Hosting. All of HN runs on a single box, nothing exotic: CPU: Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2637 v4 @ 3.50GHz (3500.07-MHz K8-class CPU) FreeBSD/SMP: 2 package(s) x 4 core(s) x 2 hardware threads Mirrored SSDs for data, mirrored magnetic for logs (UFS) We get around 4M requests a day.

FreeBSD/SMP

Good choice. :)

Three.js on HN? Interesting thought.

Raymarched SDF pyramids implemented with GLSL shaders for the voting arrows! They could be so shiny!

(It's a wonder that anyone lets me near the frontend of their websites really.)

It wouldn't surprise me if someone managed to implement a 3d voting arrow in less than the 407B transfer size of the existing .gif

Or a simple RAID array (but of course the controller should keep working).

And just as I was on the train to work. Worst. Website. Ever.

No apology necessary, but I'm curious how a hard drive failure caused an outage. No RAID or mirroring? No hot spares? No clustering or distributed systems?

HN Dashboard in 2012: https://i.imgur.com/oymP2UW.jpg

Does this still exist?

Asterix & Obelix:"The sky is falling on our heads"

Discworld:"The bottom most turtle died"

PlanetEarth:"HN is down"

These all seem like the same thing, it just depends where you are in the erm "multiverse" !

Discworld:"The bottom most turtle died"

This absurd inaccuracy cannot stand. There is a single turtle holding up the disk, Great A'Tuin. Now, if you were to claim the bottom-most elephant had died, we could talk!

But but didn't the lady said it's "Turtles all the way down ?" See cosmology is tricky no matter where you are :D

PS. According to historic records (DISCWORLD 1-41) you are right :P

If we (foolishly) ignore the one true source and read the wiki:

Stephen Hawking incorporates the saying into the beginning of his 1988 book A Brief History of Time:[20]

A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the centre of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: "What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise." The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, "What is the tortoise standing on?" "You're very clever, young man, very clever," said the old lady. "But it's turtles all the way down!"

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

This is what the internet was supposed to be ! Correcting the others on how many turtles is holding up everything :D :D

Dammit I missed Terry Pratchett :( - The man had a wicked crazy mind and flair to focus it to produce the most amazing stories, scenarios and humour.

Like having a "Thieves Guild" - "If you going to have crime you might as well have organised crime"

For those that don't know, in this scenario. The Thieves guild" got a 'budget' of how much they can steal per year (?) and if you got robbed the thief would give you a receipt. Oh and any 'unlicensed thieving' was dealt with and 'policed' by the guild itself :)

Was Pratchett making a dig at taxation? The thieves guild sounds rather like government taxation.

"Turtles all the way down" is an expression of the problem of infinite regress. < : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turtles_all_the_way_down

Will there be "I survived the Hacker News outage of July 2022" stickers available? :D

I definitely thought my network was down and was actually confused when other sites were available.