

English Wikipedia down due to dns issue - icco
http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2010/03/global-outage-cooling-failure-and-dns/

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mumrah
Why in the world would anyone have a data center in Florida?

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DLWormwood
Thanks bunches. You've now put a question in my head that I've never thought
of before and am stuck wondering about...

"Are there geographically ideal places for data centers?"

...I never thought much of the question before, since I've heard stories of
places like the Principality of Sealand being used for them, thinking that
where you put them is more a matter of politics than situation.

But Florida _does_ sound like a less than ideal place for a data center, given
its location on a peninsula in a hurricane prone part of the world. The only
advantage logistically I can think of is easy access to ocean cabling.

EDIT: That reminds me... A few weeks ago, while visiting family, my mother
asked me why they didn't put data centers in salt mines. She reasoned that the
temperature and humidity controlled environment would be ideal for climate
sensitive hardware. I didn't have a good answer for her, either with regards
if they did so or not, or why not if they didn't.

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maarek
Is this unusual for DNS failover? We are looking at doing the same thing for
our DR system. Does anyone have any experience with DNS failover?

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andrewtj
Record caching is intrinsic to DNS. Negative cache times being ignored is not
usual in my experience; but then when you're at Wikipedia's scale minority
cases are large enough that they are worth compensating for.

