[Wikitech-l] Re: [Wikipedia-l] Wiki Problems?

[Matt Brown]

On Tue, 22 Feb 2005 04:47:56 -0800, Brion Vibber <brion at pobox.com> wrote:
> The power failure was due to circuit breakers being tripped within the
> colocation facility; some of our servers have redundant power supplies
> but *both* circuits failed, causing all our machines and the network
> switch to unceremoniously shut down.

That's pretty much nightmare #1 for anyone operating in a colocation
facility.  I know if this kind of thing happened to me, I'd have
management and customers on my back immediately, asking when we were
moving datacenters to someone else ...

Nothing like a real failure to show you how truly redundant (or not)
the systems actually are.  Was it equipment failure or human failure? 
Either way, it sounds like your redundant power circuits were routed
through the same circuit breaker cabinet or both got shorted out by
the same issue.  Not good.

Of all MySQL's faults, corruption on ungraceful shutdown is one of the
worst.  I've had similar incidents on Oracle dozens of times and never
had to restore from backups.

-Matt