Server

On Friday, the server which hosts this blog suffered catastrophic data loss. Fortunately, the blog server is at a different datacenter entirely than PEAK, which hosts all the Trilogy sites. It’s a long story, and I’ll document it in more detail elsewhere, but the short version is this: This particular host’s (again, not PEAK) backup…

Our domain name registrar is GoDaddy. We’ve had a lot of problems with GoDaddy’s handling of DNS, where DNS entries will suddenly appear and disappear at random. Often, changing a completely unrelated DNS record would result in other DNS entries going missing for hours. Extremely frustrating. As a result of many, many bad experiences, over…

It was quite an honor to see that the High Scalability Blog posted an entry on Stack Overflow! We referred to the HSB, and its exhaustively detailed information about how other websites handle scaling, many times during the course of Stack Overflow development. And I’ve cited it myself when researching what we think is the…

We noticed something unusual on our Cacti graphs today. Can you spot it? Yes! The light gray of the graph background does seem a few shades lighter than normal! I see it too! No, no, of course I’m talking about that massive traffic spike from 06:00 to 15:00 PST (server time). In the words of…