[Gllug] Geographcial server failover

[Nix]

On Tue, 25 Jan 2005, Andrew Farnsworth mused:
> The very few situations I have seen where down time is a real issue is
> with Stock trading where five minutes down in the middle of the day
> can cost you millions and even a small hiccup can cost tens of
> thousands.

... and I've seen the code, and boy oh boy is it not written as if that
were true. It's generally of substantially lower quality than the code
running on your desktop right now (assuming you're running Linux that
is).

There's at least one more critical system than that that springs to
mind: telco call-routing (and to a lesser extent usage-tracking) and
exchange systems. If they fail, at the best the telco starts
haemorrhaging money at titanic speeds; at worst, 999 calls fail, and
people die.

(Note that BT has *never* to my knowledge had a failure of their
production billing systems. Errors, yes: crashes, no.)

-- 
`Blish is clearly in love with language. Unfortunately,
 language dislikes him intensely.' --- Russ Allbery
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