
Dvorak: Don't Trust Web-Application Servers - gibsonf1
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,295642,00.html
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Goladus
A big problem with the article is that they throw up "Trust" as this gigantic,
vague moral litmus test and anything you "can't trust" is evil and To Be
Avoided. In typical fox news fashion the article is so laden with
presuppositions that it's hard to discuss rationally.

There's an important distinction between what happened with WGA and the
"Software as Service" model in general. Namely, that WGA is a mostly
superfluous add-on only there to protect against piracy. The fact that the
system shuts down or locks up when WGA is not available does nothing to
support what the users bought the OS for in the first place.

It's true that you can't trust 100% uptime from web servers. Millions of
Myspace users are pretty solid evidence that people can live with this. The
advantages of the server-based method are generally appreciated by customers,
who are also generally aware of the drawbacks. In contrast, users tend not to
appreciate being treated like criminals and having their OS crashed on purpose
because it couldn't complete a minor validation step.

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gibsonf1
The crazy premise in this story is that MS represents great technology> MS
radically messed up their online service > therefore online on-demand services
are a bad idea. Yikes!

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edw519
An argument gone too far.

Which is more likely to happen?

a. Google, Amazon, Yahoo, or <other host> goes down and loses all of your
data.

b. Your hard disk crashes and you have no backup.

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mynameishere
There's a (I don't know whether to call it a fallacy, but I will)...there's a
fallacy that Jumbo Jets are safer than automobiles. This assertion is easily
derived from looking at death statistics from each vehicle. But then, such
statistics involve random parties. You or I aren't random drivers and so we
may be very safe or very dangerous on the road [1].

Anyway, the average person's data is much more likely to disappear than that
on google's server clusters. But if you are diligent, you can have backups
that work 99.9999999 percent of the time quite easily.

[1] Of course, on roads, the guy driving in the other lane is pseudo-random,
so... But there is no other lane with computers.

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edw519
I am ALWAYS concerned about this (some may call it fanatic). I back up
everything twice every night. Hit the safe deposit box once a week. Always
have one thumb drive with me, another hidden. Print hard copies of recently
changed code.

What if I have a break-in? What about a fire? How about lightning? (Already
lost 2 servers that were protected - it happens.) What about a flood?

Sometimes I wonder why I don't just store everything on the "cloud". One of
these days...

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mynameishere
_Print hard copies of recently changed code._

Okay, that's nuts. ;)

Source code shouldn't be a problem. It practically backs itself up: 1)
Production server(s), 2) Test server(s), 3) Development server(s), 4) Source
control server.

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edw519
"It practically backs itself up"

I'll rank that up there with "Step on it! We're only doing 90!" as famous last
words.

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cstejerean
i think this article takes what happened to WGA in the wrong direction. I
think the lessons to be learned from the WGA outage is that critical systems
should avoid relying on external services or at least provide a fail safe
mechanism.

Also, as far as I can tell from the article the servers that went down were
not hosting true web applications that users log into, just web services that
some desktop software relied upon. There are plenty of other network services
that desktop computer need to function correctly (for example DNS). Perhaps
the WGA failure should server as a lesson in risk management and designing
applications with decent failure modes.

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far33d
Proving that no matter what the topic - everything on Fox News is knee-jerk,
under-reported, and over-simplified.

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gibsonf1
Actually, this seems to be from PC Magazine and just reprinted in Fox.

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far33d
Man, i'm 0 for 2 today.

