Ooops, up again, great...

[Jim Cassedy]

Database corruption due to all the power issues this last week

it seems power and corruption often go together....

[Leo Enticknap]

I'm thankful things here on the North side of the Red River didn't turn out nearly as bad as they did in Texas.

I feel a bit guilty noting that in Southern California, you'd have had no idea that there has been any unusual weather anywhere else in the country if you weren't keeping an eye on the news media, or had your coronavirus vaccine appointment rescheduled (deliveries were disrupted, apparently). Temperatures, wind, and precipitation have all been bang on the long term average for this time of year over the last couple of weeks. It's still a little strange to realize that I'm just half a day's drive from where there has recently been life threatening extreme weather, though, with no sign whatsoever of it here.

That's not to deny that we have infrastructure challenges, the big ones being water supply and wildfire prevention. Fingers crossed for a quick and effective recovery in Texas.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Interestingly, around the same time the unexpected and unprecedented cold hit a large part of the southern United States, we also had a major dip in temperature here in large parts of Europe. While most of the infrastructure here is built to withstand those kind of temperatures as they used to be pretty common, it has been about 10 years now since we last had such cold weather... Now, just a week later, temperatures are like it's late April or May already... Apparently, we just had the warmest days in February on record...

Database corruption due to all the power issues this last week. The forums have been rolled back to last Sunday's backup.

Yeah, MySQL, PostgreSQL and the like don't appreciate it when the server you're hosting it on is blinking on and off into existence. Repairing broken databases can also be a major pain in the butt... I hope none of the gear broke. The last time we faced something similar, we eventually decided to just pull the plug, until everything was back stable again. Much of this equipment really doesn't like flaky power situations and a UPS will only get you so far.

Haven't you considered putting public stuff like your site and the forum onto some "cloud" server somewhere? Not that the cloud is without problems, but at least most Texas DCs seem to have made it through the ordeal, mostly unharmed.

[Randy Stankey]

When the site went down for a day, I figured that it was due to power outages in Texas. After that, it would come back up but would only serve empty pages. I figured that the server had crashed.

Haven't you considered putting public stuff like your site and the forum onto some "cloud" server somewhere?

A few years ago, I helped administer a website and I created a script that backed up the entire site to my computer at home every night.
There was another guy in Alaska and a third in central Canada. With three backups in three different parts of North America, we figured it would take a zombie apocalypse to destroy all three copies. At least one of the three of us would be able to restore the site or, if need be, re-point the address to another server and rebuild the site at a new location.

Beats the crap out of any cloud thing-a-ma-jiggy!

[David Ferguson]

The cloud can be good for some things, but is actually often more expensive than self hosting. Remember, the cloud is just someone else's computer, and you can have a better or worse setup than cloud providers. It seems that Brad has proper backups in place, and with the extraordinary events in Texas, an outage of a few days isn't unreasonable. I'm glad it's back, though - I had to resort to using an archived version of the site on the Internet Archive to get a couple of manuals I needed!

[Marcel Birgelen]

Beats the crap out of any cloud thing-a-ma-jiggy!

You should always make backups, running something in the cloud is no excuse for not making backups.

The cloud can be good for some things, but is actually often more expensive than self hosting. Remember, the cloud is just someone else's computer, and you can have a better or worse setup than cloud providers. It seems that Brad has proper backups in place, and with the extraordinary events in Texas, an outage of a few days isn't unreasonable. I'm glad it's back, though - I had to resort to using an archived version of the site on the Internet Archive to get a couple of manuals I needed!

It highly depends on what you're doing. You can get some VPS that would be "good enough" for a few dollars per month. You can get two VPSes on two different hosters in two different sites for a few dollars more. It beats running some old hardware in some basement 9 out of 10 of the times. Remember: the hours support you put into the thing and the dollars added to your energy bill also count in the whole process.

If you have a lot of stuff to host, then self-hosting can be cheaper. Still, always take into account the time and money you need to spend to keep things up. To make proper backups, etc., etc.

[Mike Blakesley]

We had a five-day stretch last week where the thermometer didn't climb above zero at all. The "peak" cold was -39 or -41, depending on who you ask. Here in town, everybody looks at the time-n-temp clock on the bank, and the lowest temp I saw on that was -31. The absolute worst was out on 'the flat" east of town, where there are no hills to stop the wind. Out there it was below zero AND windy.

The cool thing was, one week after that -31, the temperature was 80 degrees higher and it felt like mid summer outside, even though it was only 49 degrees.

It's been a fairly normal winter for us in Montana, although in my part of the state (southeastern MT) we still have less snow than we normally would at this time of year. The ground is mostly bare right now.

[Bobby Henderson]

I'm out on that -40°F stuff. That's almost cold enough for you to spit in the air and have it freeze by the time it hits the ground. I think that's supposed to be able happen at -50°F. When I was a kid I was able to experience -23°F on Christmas Eve in Syracuse, NY. The high temperature Christmas Day was a balmy 0°F.

[Frank Cox]

Two weeks ago we had a couple of nights that got down to -54, days around -40 or so. Almost nobody came to the shows those nights, of course, because their cars would freeze up while they were here. What a difference a couple of weeks makes: right now it's -4 and yesterday the snow was melting...

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

We had a five-day stretch last week where the thermometer didn't climb above zero at all. The "peak" cold was -39 or -41, depending on who you ask. Here in town, everybody looks at the time-n-temp clock on the bank, and the lowest temp I saw on that was -31. The absolute worst was out on 'the flat" east of town, where there are no hills to stop the wind. Out there it was below zero AND windy.

The cool thing was, one week after that -31, the temperature was 80 degrees higher and it felt like mid summer outside, even though it was only 49 degrees..

I don't ever remember it being that cold in Forsyth, or in Montana in winter on the trips I made there over 20+ years. I do remember once it was -18 degrees. And it was the same -18 degrees when I got to Jackson Hole on the way home. But the dryness helps and it does not feel like it is really -18 degrees.. Here in TN, it's way more humid and 30 degrees feels like -18 out west...

[Mike Blakesley]

I don't ever remember it being that cold in Forsyth, or in Montana in winter on the trips I made there over 20+ years.

It's pretty rare to have the extended cold in this part of the state, but we usually do get maybe one stretch per winter where it's in the -20 or colder range for a day or two. Last year, I don't think it ever got colder than -10. Those poor people at Plentywood (extreme north-east) always seem to have the coldest weather in Montana ... if there is a cold snap, it's almost always the coldest at Plentywood.

I can relate about the humidity. A few years ago we were in Florida during January when they were having record cold temps down there. It was in the 30s which wouldn't feel bad at all here, but in all that humidity it felt like we were going to freeze to death.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

It's pretty rare to have the extended cold in this part of the state, but we usually do get maybe one stretch per winter where it's in the -20 or colder range for a day or two. Last year, I don't think it ever got colder than -10. Those poor people at Plentywood (extreme north-east) always seem to have the coldest weather in Montana ... if there is a cold snap, it's almost always the coldest at Plentywood.

I can relate about the humidity. A few years ago we were in Florida during January when they were having record cold temps down there. It was in the 30s which wouldn't feel bad at all here, but in all that humidity it felt like we were going to freeze to death.

Sounds like a re-name is needed to Plentycold.

[Leo Enticknap]

Interestingly, around the same time the unexpected and unprecedented cold hit a large part of the southern United States, we also had a major dip in temperature here in large parts of Europe. While most of the infrastructure here is built to withstand those kind of temperatures as they used to be pretty common, it has been about 10 years now since we last had such cold weather...

My admittedly fading memory of living in England is that the winters tended to go in ten years of mild ones, followed by one or two seriously cold December to February periods. During my early childhood in the late '70s there were a few very snowy winters in London, but the '80s winters were mainly mild. I hardly ever saw snow, except on visits to relatives up north. Then in 1991 came the infamous "wrong type of snow" winter in which the commuter rail system serving London literally froze up. Then more mild winters, but I remember 1999-2000 and 2000-01 as being colder than usual. More mild winters, and then during the 2010-11 winter, the temperature in my backyard in York went down to -18 Celsius, and the pipes froze. More mild winters, then my British relatives report that last winter and this one were very cold and snowy.

[Mark Gulbrandsen]

The cold freeze and the deep snow here were the first in 43 years. So we are not on the ten year cycle in Nashville. But both the old and the new Farmers Almanac's said this was going to be a really bad winter. And when both those agree we better take it seriously... My hell! I wonder what it says about 2021???

[Leo Enticknap]

Driving to a service call this morning, a weather expert on a local talk radio show said that the last time snow fell in downtown LA was in February 1948. There was a little in Malibu along the Pacific Coast Highway a couple of weeks ago, but it didn't make it over the LA city limits, so the record still stands.