Posts by Phillip Spencer

1) Message boards : Projects : Anything and Everything to do with (WCG) World Community Grid (Message 112934)
Posted 15 Oct 2023 by Phillip Spencer
Post:
Looks like the restore of the website is happening over the weekend. That is a bit of a surprise given their support hours.
The site came up (Sunday morning, French time) and I was able to log in and see pages. The "Last updated" time is 12:06 UTC 9 October so I guess it is back to the last full back-up at the moment.
Anyway, good to see progress!
2) Message boards : Projects : Anything and Everything to do with (WCG) World Community Grid (Message 112890)
Posted 12 Oct 2023 by Phillip Spencer
Post:
Website still out. Now instead of "systems error" all I see is "503 Service Unavailable - No server is available to handle this request." Not sure if this is progress or not.
Not seen any SCC WUs for a while either but some MCMs were still coming through last night (French time).
3) Message boards : Projects : Anything and Everything to do with (WCG) World Community Grid (Message 111464)
Posted 31 Mar 2023 by Phillip Spencer
Post:
Late Friday and it looks like the website is down again. I went to get a quick status update from the News forum and that is giving me "Error 500: java.lang.NullPointerException" while my stats page is back to the "System error" message.
One step forward, two steps back?
4) Message boards : Projects : Anything and Everything to do with (WCG) World Community Grid (Message 111390)
Posted 23 Mar 2023 by Phillip Spencer
Post:
Oh gOD, will you write here every day, that WCG STILL doesn't work?
Maybe it's already worth stopping blazing about that, wait until it works and then write about it here?

If there had been more / better communication from the WCG project team during this extended failure (and previous ones) volunteers would be more relaxed. As it is, the black humour of the photos above brighten my wait for something approaching normal service to be resumed. (But then I am a Brit living in EUrope and bleak humour is all I have to sustain me!)
5) Message boards : Projects : Anything and Everything to do with (WCG) World Community Grid (Message 111378)
Posted 22 Mar 2023 by Phillip Spencer
Post:
I get it now. They ordered new hardware, and it's being delivered from China, on a rowboat.
Of course, that's the only explanation for 3-weeks of BOINC downtime.

I like it! Of course the problem with the picture is that it actually shows two functioning oars. I suspect they have less than two.
6) Message boards : Projects : News on Project Outages (Message 111289)
Posted 14 Mar 2023 by Phillip Spencer
Post:
WCG website back and forums working (but, sadly, no official communication update yesterday)

It looks like I spoke too soon. Website and forums down once more with the "System Error" message again. This does not bode well for the overall recovery.
7) Message boards : Projects : News on Project Outages (Message 111288)
Posted 14 Mar 2023 by Phillip Spencer
Post:
WCG website back and forums working (but, sadly, no official communication update yesterday)
8) Message boards : Projects : News on Project Outages (Message 111236)
Posted 9 Mar 2023 by Phillip Spencer
Post:
just restart/reconnect a storage system.

This can be completely different level of problem.
It's time to calm down and just wait for result.
Blaming them every day can't help this situation at all : )

Unfortunately, this is not the first issue since restart (well into double digits now, I suspect, even ignoring the length of time migration took).
I believe there is a combination of issues at play (to name a few off the top of my head):
- Jurisica lab not understanding the complexity of what they were taking on from IBM and biting off more than they can chew;
- Krebil's IT having other priorities (be interesting to see their service level agreement for this!);
- insufficient resources invested to avoid single point of failure outages;
- old/repurposed devices pressed into action as temporary fixes;
- unanticipated consequences from moving off IBM technology to alternative software.
In this particular instance I would like to understand better how they use RAID for storage back-up and mirroring since the early reference to having tape back-ups was disconcerting as I would have assumed these were overnight and not real-time.
If Jurisica Lab's communication was significantly better / faster that might "calm down" everyone who, like me, has invested time and effort into supporting WCG over the years.
Cheers
Phillip
9) Message boards : Projects : News on Project Outages (Message 111181)
Posted 6 Mar 2023 by Phillip Spencer
Post:
And it's finally Monday. Let's see if anything at all happens with WCG today.
It's only 05:33 in Toronto yet, so maybe something happens in a couple of hours.

More in hope than certainty! Do you have pigs that fly in Sweden? I just saw several Porcine Flying Objects overhead in South West France and distinctly heard them squealing "(B)oink, (B)oink"
Fingers crossed!
Phillip
10) Message boards : Projects : News on Project Outages (Message 111156)
Posted 3 Mar 2023 by Phillip Spencer
Post:
To: Grumpy Swede
Thank you for posting updates on WCG here. I don't use Facebook or Twitter so, with the forums down as well, this thread has become my source of information.
Cheers
Phillip



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