"Anthere" anthere6@yahoo.com wrote in message news:20030920125847.92054.qmail@web41708.mail.yahoo.com...
Thinking about it...when Wikipedia was down yesterday, only the english wikipedia displayed a red message saying it was not editable, but allowed read only. On the french wikipedia, it was just and that was all. No warning message saying "well, guys, sorry, we are trying to fix the stuff" and not even read-only wikipedia.
I don't know if this is due to the existence of the two servers and if it would have been possible that the fr wikipedia be read only as well.
If it is possible, could it be that we switch to read only mode and alert message as well, instead of just letting people wondering why the whole site is not working at all ?
Sorry if I just don't understand the organisation of that at all. I just think it is real bad that people just don't know what is going on.
Unfortunately there was nothing I could do about that. We could display an error message on en: because the requests for en: web pages go to larousse, and larousse was working fine. The database was on pliny, and that server was not responding.
Requests for web pages on the other-language wikis go straight to pliny, not via another webserver. If I had root access (and assuming I also had some vague understanding of linux networking), I might have been able to pull an IP aliasing trick like Brion did last time larousse went down. That involves making larousse pretend to be pliny. I imagine Brion would have attempted that if he had more time.
Soon, the other-language webserving will also be moved to larousse, which is fine as long as larousse doesn't crash.
-- Tim Starling <t=starling=physics=unimelb=edu=au>