
All 37signals Apps Were Down - mef
http://status.37signals.com/
======
jbail
I'm wondering how the red and green indicators look to someone who is color
blind. Yes, the page looks nice, but I think Apple's status page is better
simply because the indicator icons are (I'm assuming) better for people with
color blindness.

Anyone who's color blind want to weigh in?

<http://www.apple.com/support/systemstatus/>

~~~
pc86
How common is color blindness? I'm not saying it shouldn't be a consideration,
I've just heard it mentioned _a lot_ and I'm curious if it's much more common
than I had originally though (low single-digit percentages, higher among
males)?

~~~
DigitalJack
I'm red-green colorblind (deficient would probably be a better term).

What I've heard fairly often is the percentage ranges from 8-12% of males.

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MichaelApproved
Seems like, in many cases, the number of colorblind people is higher than the
numer of people using IE6. Would be a better use of resources to accommodate
them than it would be to accommodate IE6 customers.

Of course, some colorblind people also use IE6, so there's overlap there, but
is still rather code for colorblind people than IE6.

~~~
DigitalJack
Colorblindness is something that can be designed around, but I'd be happy if I
could find a plugin to alter a web page's palette.

EDIT: found this, but haven't tried yet:
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-
daltonize/e...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/chrome-
daltonize/efeladnkafmoofnbagdbfaieabmejfcf)

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facorreia
They have a very impressive status dashboard. Clear, informative and dynamic.
It refreshed itself while I was watching with progress updates.

~~~
mccolin
Agreed! It's one of the best status pages I've seen for a service (or set of
services) like theirs. It's almost as if it's the AWS status pages run through
a prettification machine.

~~~
Scottopherson
Heroku's page is also great: <https://status.heroku.com/>

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mhartl
This is actually good PR for 37signals. We already knew that all apps go down
from time to time. What we now know is that (a) 37signals has a great status
page, (b) they are transparent about their uptime, and (c) that uptime is in
the 99.98–98.99% range.

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mikeevans
Looks like a load balancer issue:
<http://status.37signals.com/status/campfire/2013/4/17>

~~~
masonhensley
I'm not too familiar with load balancers. I'm slowly learning rails server
stuff that's more complicated than heroku.

Why would all of their applications be sitting behind a single load balancer?
Wouldn't you want to silo them so that you do not have a single point of
failure for all of your products?

~~~
banachtarski
All roads lead to a single URL (aka IP address) so somewhere along the way,
you're going to have a single point of failure that does a one to many
multiplexing, logically speaking.

~~~
sokoloff
Mason's question was about multiple URLs. IOW, "why does
basecamp.37signals.com share a load balancer with campfire.37signals.com?"

It's usually for cost reasons. Hardware load balancers are expensive, and the
job they do isn't especially computationally expensive, so it's generally
accepted to host multiple VIPs on a single load balancer.

Looking at it the other way, being 100% down on one LB might be preferable to
being 50% down when a single LB out of two fails. The alternative gives you
twice as many chances for failure, even though each chance is half as "bad".
Common-mode failure mechanisms would of course still bring you entirely down.
(Bad config by a human being the most common cause.)

~~~
ironchef
Most modern hardware LBs support active-active or active-passive connections
with each other (deploying two A10s, etc.). It's been this way for 15 or so
years (since local director, bigip, arrowpoint, etc.). The main reasons you
would suffer from this would be misconfiguration or too cheap to buy 2 LBs.

~~~
themcgruff
(I do ops at 37signals...) We have two top of the line ("high end") load
balancers at each site. They malfunctioned. When they both malfunction at
once, it doesn't matter whether it's active/active or active/passive or
anything like that.

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dude3
I posted this code from here on Basecamp:
[http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6529728/html5-doctype-
put...](http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6529728/html5-doctype-putting-
ie9-into-quirks-mode)

Answer number one. It came in with the html with the stackoverflow profile
pictures and all. I was like crap so I switched to non html formatting. I
probably clicked a few times, it kept loading and loading. Basecamp went down
right when that happened.

Could have been the problem...

It looks like it actually posts to basecamp servers to do the reformat. Why
can't they just do this in javascript?

I am using Basecamp Classic with Firefox.

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johnernaut
Painful yet interesting. I'm looking forward to the post-mortem on this.

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mountaineer
Interesting that the "RSS" status link goes to rss.atom and is in fact an atom
feed. RSS has more meaning I guess.

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jebblue
Google Apps was down this morning too, wonder if there are any similarities.

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oit
One of the best status page!

