Floods Cause Firetop Outage
by matt @ 7:55 pm. Blogged under Web Hosting, Living and Dying
I’ve been thanking my lucky stars that we don’t live beside a river in Gloucestershire of late. However, this morning the serious nature of the problem was brought home to me when the Firetop server was put offline for two hours because of the rising flood waters in Gloucester - home of our dedicated server. The flood waters themselves don’t threaten the server physically, even the potential outage of power in the area is covered by back-up generators, instead support staff were unable to get into the office quickly to reboot equipment after the generators kicked in. Thankfully they won’t be going home tonight (they couldn’t if they wanted to) so things should be ticking along as normal for the foreseeable future, but it makes you realise how much the physical world does still impact on the virtual one.
I do wonder whether those affected by the flood waters across the UK will in future better prepare themselves with an emergency supply of food and water. My wife has for some time been embarrassed at her husband’s own stash of 60 litres of drinking water, food for a week and a camping stove - she wasn’t laughing when the water was cut off inexplicably back in April though, and wouldn’t be if we too were currently suffering from flooding. Indeed her slightly tongue in cheek remark tonight ‘maybe you should add a dinghy’ is a very good suggestion, I shall be keeping an eye out for one on eBay.
Technorati Tags: floods, servers, emergency food, drinking water
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July 23rd, 2007 at 9:04 pm
Lucky your aunts and uncles all live at the top of the hills and not at the bottom eh? We don’t have a river in Chippy but the water is running past the front of my house in a torrent, and Bidford is under water -any news on your wedding dress Laura?…. I’ve just heard the weather forecast and hey - it’s your turn next Matt!! Quick get the dinghy
August 14th, 2007 at 12:48 pm
‘Outage’? Is that yet another example of computer geekism afflicting our language?!?! Presumably from the context it’s supposed to mean ‘cessation’or’stopping providing something’and, yes, it has the advantage of being shorter, or would have, if it actually existed as a word.What’s wrong with the title ‘Floods stop Firetop’, more succinct and all proper, unugly (no, it doesn’t exist either!) words, apart from having a useful bit of alliteration.
So what’s ‘inage’? The act of introducing something?
I’ve long been frustrated by the inability of computer savants to explain the supposed logic of computer use in normal logical language so please don’t confuse that normal language too!!
August 14th, 2007 at 12:58 pm
I’m afraid I now trust Google implicitly for my grammatical accuracies - ‘Outage Definitions‘… they’re taking over the world
August 14th, 2007 at 2:29 pm
Thanks Matt; obviously I must stand corrected but find it utterly significant that my conventional dictionaries, consulted first, don’t deign to include it whilst one in the electronic world of computer confusion includes a myriad of them, many subtly different from others of course! Surprising that there’s no reference to the business of the outing of those of that persuasion which would seem to be a more valid use of the word…if used it has to be!
August 14th, 2007 at 9:09 pm
It’s such a brave new world. Time to get with the programme Colin. Or would that be program? Whatever!