[Foundation-l] Scheduled intermittent downtime on all Wikimedia projects on May 24

[Domas Mituzas]

Hi!

> That's... completely missing the point. Yes the specific errors faced were
> unexpected or unforseen, BUT they were a* direct result* of the maintenance
> between 13:00 and 14:00. I am simply passing on the feeling of our
> readership; which was that the situation was badly communicated to them.

As majority of our users are anons, who visit us once a day or two, we should probably have started a communication campaign at least two months before the maintenance. 
We practice a lot during fundraisers :-) 

OTOH, if there's no downtime, maybe we're causing quite some frustration with superfluous communication? :-) 

> I am trying to share my experience here as a sysadmin and website operator;

Oh, finally we got some sysadmins and website operators here. 
As a sysadmin you sure understand that in larger distributed systems which are not all built on a set of SPOFs there can be various failure modes, happening at various layers and various fuzziness. 
As a website operator you sure know that it is lots of effort to prepare boilerplates for every possible situation :-)

> users hate downtime/maintenance, and will complain about it endlessly.

You have some annoying users, our users are awesome and don't complain endlessly!

> Improving our communication of planned maintenance is definitely a good idea.

So is curing cancer. 

Marcus Buck wrote:
> Domas, what are you trying to achieve with your comments on Tom's  
> suggestions? 


Put some clue in? 

> The sensible reaction (from a person who is involved in the maintenance) would be:

I know nobody likes this, but sensible reaction is to work on good operation rather than standing in front of a mirror and trying five hundred different "I'm sorry" phrases. 
You look too much from that single position, that "communication is good", without weighting costs or other options. 

Cheers,
Domas