Posted on 02/25/2009 9:05:46 AM PST by george76
Gmail's bounced back from its recent multihour outage, but questions over what went wrong are thus far unanswered. The Google mail service was offline from about 4:30 a.m. until 7:00 a.m. ET (or from 9:30 a.m. till noon for nations on Greenwich Mean Time). Google says it is now "investigating the root cause" of the issue.
Tuesday's Gmail outage left users seeing only a "502 server error" page when trying to login to the Web-based system. Word of the problem spread quickly via Twitter and didn't take long to hit the tech blogs, where it was quickly dubbed as "the great Gmail outage of 2009." Some unofficial reports indicated the outage lasted as long as four hours. Google says it was only about two-and-a-half.
While "frequent" would probably be an exaggeration when it comes to describing Gmail outages, "unusual" might be missing the mark by a hair, too. In the past six months, Gmail has suffered some form of downtime on five separate occasions before this week's incident:
(Excerpt) Read more at tech.yahoo.com ...
I run my owne servers. Haven’t gone down in the three years they were booted.
win2k?
gmail sucks. google must die.
This is the first time I can recall it being unreachable. Sometimes it has behaved in a flakey manner, but normally I'm very satisfied with it.
I wonder what protections such a service has from DOS attacks? Is that a vulnerability?
Win 2003 Servers. Works great.
They work great if you don’t install any vendor applications. Domain controllers, Exchange, OCS, SharePoint, Microsoft anything will run very well on that platform. MS did something right with their server kernel. Wish they could extend it to their desktop platforms!
As far as Google... just damn. I’m a data center engineer, and I can attest that we have problems with some systems, but in general, 6 unplanned outages in less than a year is unacceptable by ANY IT standard.
“They work great if you don’t install any vendor applications.”
The problem is 99.99% of most software out there is developed by the same set idiot managers and programmers. There is very little software out there that is well designed, built, and managed. I have worked in many industries and with more companies than I can count, so when I pick up a telephone and get a dial tone I am amazed.
I think that the GMAil web user interface is decades behind Yahoo’s current interface. I can easily navigate through lists of emails, view the contents of the email in the preview window below and — behold! — when I print, it can size the email to fit the page. It also has good search capabilities, results of which are available in a separate window so I don’t lose my place in my email listings.
I find that for my needs, when I use GMail (it is my second email account for mass mailings and the like) that I continuously have to navigate back and forth to pick and choose among the few emails I want to read. And, it doesn’t size to print, at least as far as I can tell.
Is there something I am missing out with Gmail that you have discovered?
I’ve been in IT for 15 years, and yes, most of the application programmers are completely ignorant to processing outside of the OS kernel. Besides that, I LOVE vendors who require an account to stay logged in at the desktop (non-service applications). Talk about security risk!
I love watching Microsoft developers get thrown into Linux. There’s a hidden video out there where some devs played a joke on a team member and installed SuSE on his desktop. He came in and had a nervous breakdown. I don’t know if it was staged, but it was hilarious either way.
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