Sam’s random musings

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p>Bingodisk and Strongspace: What Happened?

The past 10 days have not been the best days at Joyent. Bingodisk and Strongspace went off-line 12 Saturday. Bingodisk service was restored eight days later on 19 January. Strongspace limped back into service late 21 January, nearly ten days after it went off-line. Customers of these services are rightly outraged by the outage. While Strongspace and Bingodisk represent a very small fraction of Joyent’s entire infrastructure, we understand how critical it is to many of you, and have been working and investing many, many hours to bring these services back on-line as expeditiously as possible. I apologize for the outages.

This is an important read on a couple of fronts.

• it really helps one to understand the dangers of putting all your backup plans in a single ‘cool’ technology
• that the really hard part about a problem that requires restoration from a back up is the restoration
• that this kind of transparency about a problem will probably go a long way for Joyeur.

It should be noted that I am the owner of a couple of lifetime plans with Joyeur and really like most of their services.

(Via Joyeur.)

Beanstalk Subversion Hosting

Beanstalk is a hosted Subversion system, offering a simple web-based UI for creating and managing repositories. They also offer smooth integration with systems such as Basecamp, Campfire, FogBugz, Twitter, and Lighthouse. You can get started with a free account — free, I say — in just minutes, and can upgrade to a paid plan at any time. Beanstalk is a perfect example of a ‘do one thing and do it well’ service.

This is a nice looking service, one that I might test out for the next collaborative project that I have for a client. Traditionally I have set up the repos on a machine that I control and then have to figure out how to migrate the service later. It might be nice to take an existing service and just pass it off instead….

(Via Daring Fireball.)