LiveJournal.com, for much of today: “Our data center (Internap) lost all its power, including redundant backup power, for some unknown reason. (unknown to me, at least) We’re currently dealing with bringing our 100 servers back online. Not fun. We’re not happy about this. Sorry… :-/ More details later.”
I recall looking at some hosting facilty just when they opened, looking for facilities for our tiny set of boxes. I think we may have gone with them too. I had the stupid role in the movie where the other people get to fiddle with the gear and I answered the cell phone over and over again, hand holding increasingly far-removed-from me upper-ups.
The best one was when we sweet-talked our way past the night-time security guy even though we didn’t have any good credentials or the passphrase, and then talked our way into the on-site tech-staff’s glass room to get a clean test connection to our boxen from outside our class C.
It sounds like a bad movie from the eighties, huh? Apparently we got everyone in trouble there because of this but I went to bat for them, since I could have yanked our account there.
Other things I remember from the hosting center: the deep chill of the rooms, cooled to keep the hardware from overheating. The black-enameled hard wire mesh that enclosed many other clients’ systems, keeping information caged, as it were. The dizzy-headed 3am feeling that somehow we’d become ensnared in some sort of hacker wet dream or pulp novel. Arriving onsite as the sun set and leaving as dawn pinked the sky. The 2001-like all-over flourescent brightness of the space. The plastic-and-lacquer gas-off smell of new computers and freshly installed network paneling.
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The things I remember about the hosting facilities I’ve spent time at:
Forgetting to bring a jacket when I was going to be there overnight, and nearly freezing to death.
Arriving at the facility to find that our machines had been removed from the racks and stacked in an unsecured corner of the room. Waking our representative up with a middle of the night phone call to ask him wtf was going on. When a vital equipment wasn’t in the stack in the corner, dragging him out of bed and down to the facility so he could find it in another company’s cabinet.
Being afraid of being killed by the halon fire suppression system.
A high-security palm reader attached to the main door to the hosting space, and a glass door to the office space, which connected via unsecured doors to the hosting space.
Calling the facility’s 24 hour support line from onsite and getting voicemail.
Ahh, good times.