

CouchSurfing Deletes Itself, Shuts Down - Old, yet relevant - senthil_rajasek
http://www.techcrunch.com/2006/06/29/couchsurfing-deletes-itself-shuts-down/

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jo
More info from the source. <http://www.couchsurfing.com/crash_page.html>

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senthil_rajasek
Ran into this old story on TC, just reinforced the point that disaster
recovery is not just about careful planning but also about experience. Make
sure you periodically, test your backup disaster recovery plan too.

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mikeatlas
Today, at over half a million members with CS2.0, they're more stable, and
doing things like using AWS for static picture serving needs. And there are
many more people working on keeping it up and running these days :)

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briansmith
"...We have retained the professional 'Gold Support Service' of MySQL..."

It is interesting that if MySQL had built-in measures to prevent this kind of
disaster, MySQL would have never got any money from them.

That is the problem I see with commercial FOSS: if your product installs
easily, runs perfectly, and is easy to use, there is no way to make money.

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wvenable
MySQL does have built-in measures to prevent this kind of disaster! They
should have enabled binary logging and use that to make low impact backups.
They also could have used replication (also built in) to avoid all these
problems and have a hot backup.

The only reason they retained the 'Gold Support Service' is because their own
database administrators obviously had no idea what they were doing or how to
use the software correctly.

There are always companies that will make use of commercial support for FOSS
but MySQL will probably never make any money from me.

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sh1mmer
I wonder about the DBAs they hired. It would be interesting to hear about some
hiring lessons based on this.

At some point you have to be able to trust people, and unless you are already
an expert in that area how do you really know?

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tweety
Besides the tragic (or incompetent?) tech failures, what do folks here think
about the founder initially just calling it quits on the community?

Having followed this particular crash-recovery saga unfold and being involved
with web 2.0 otherwise, it would be interesting to hear a few thoughts over
this: what's the responsibility of the platform provider towards their
possibly very engaged community - or is there any?

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sh1mmer
I think it's a difficult dilemma, but ultimately the founders don't owe the
community unless people were paying for a service. Firstly, without the
founder there would be no community, secondly, their work created and made the
community possible. They have to be responsible to themselves, and that might
mean taking a break.

If the community wants to remain a community then normally someone else will
step up, that's the power of community, it's bigger than just a web site. In
the case of couch surfing v2 seems to be going strong.

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GavinB
I would hope the founder of a company with a successful community would at
least try to pass on the name and membership to community members or other
entrepreneurs who would try to continue the community. I'm sure there are
plenty of entrepreneurs and businesses who would have been happy to get
nothing but the domain name and member list to try to start a new couchsurfing
(though it appears that the service came back just fine on its own).

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chmac
CouchSurfing International Inc was registered as a non-profit and is now a
charity.

Knowing a bit about it (having been a volunteer for the org) I think the crash
was extremely badly handled. For better or worse, many people were relying on
the service to find places to stay, connect with people in foreign cities, and
so on. Leaving those people high and dry is bad karma. Likewise, users should
be encouraged to make "backups" in the form of phone nos, email addresses, etc
if the reliability of the site can't be guaranteed.

I think the problem is a classic one in technology. The geeks at the helm are
over confident. Their self belief clouds their judgement with regards to
backups, failure planning, and so on.

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maneesh
thank god couchsurfing is back and better than before---i would be dead in
europe and south america without it

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nraynaud
how do you backup and recover your stuff ?

I can't find any prepackaged thing on the web. I'd like to address 2 needs :
disaster recovery and point in time recovery.

For now I only dump the database from time to time, but it's far from a real
solution, if I loose my whole server it would take quite some time to get its
configuration back on track.

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dmpayton
If it's a *nix system, why not setup a cron job to do it for you? I have a
Python script in /etc/cron.daily that performs a mysql-dump, tars it, and
uploads it to S3.

For total completeness and peace-of-mind, you could have the script add
anything else you need backed up, like your projects or public_html
directories, configuration files, etc.

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chmac
Running mysqldump on a database the size of CouchSurfing's is a real problem.
It's a resource hog. To properly back up a consistent data image you need to
use locking, which prevents writes to your database while the backup is
running. That causes downtime on every backup, not ideal.

Likewise, when backing up 100s of GiBs of data, a simple tar gz is not
suitable. More sophisticated strategies need to be used when the data becomes
that big.

I've found <http://HighScalability.com> to be a great source of information on
building scalable applications.

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wallflower
Awesome historical lesson. You will know you have built something of value
when it becomes much, much bigger than you.

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zby
This was not the only mismanagement of Couchsurfing. It is a great idea - but
the organisation is a bit authoritarian. Read more at:
<http://www.opencouchsurfing.org/>

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gustaf
This sucks. When I first heard about CouchSurfing i wrote it down on my list
of "Ideas that will change the world". Maybe someone can make a new version
and integrate it with Facebook?

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bdr
The story is from 2006. CouchSurfing is alive and well. :)

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azharcs
This is really a sad news, feel sorry for the founder of Couchsurfing . Hope
they recover. Best of Luck.

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13ren
Wow, freaky tingles up and down my spine from that last paragraph.

