from Hacker News

“Let's talk about a hypothetical public-facing service”

by kgm on 7/18/15, 8:01 PM with 67 comments

• by smacktoward on 7/18/15, 9:20 PM

  > You have a moment where you envision the future of virtualized storage and think about how great it will be when storage is nearly free and outsourceable and you can stop buying disks from Amazon every few months

  The future is now! Instead of you sending money to Amazon and them sending you disks, they keep the disks and you send them the money anyway.

  Progress! :-D

• by rosser on 7/18/15, 10:39 PM

  ...Extremely Massive Corporation...

  I knew EMC storage was utter shit when, upon attempting to create a new RAID group, I realized that the configuration tool's default was to stripe across drives within a shelf, not to create stripes that span shelves.

  Worse, to create the more fault-tolerant, shelf-spanning RAID volumes, one must manually add drives, one by one to the array, in a process that involves about 44 (slight hyperbole) clicks per disk.

  And then there was the fact that the configuration tool was Windows-only.

  Yeah, screw those guys.

• by intrasight on 7/18/15, 9:16 PM

  Got a good chuckle. Such is life in IT. Gotta admit I missed the "Extremely Massive Corporation" hint.

• by zatkin on 7/18/15, 9:15 PM

  I was hoping they would stay offline. It's really disappointing to see a good service turn into a money wringing desperation.

• by galoppini on 7/19/15, 9:03 AM

  SourceForge has posted info about current infrastructure and service restoration activity at http://sourceforge.net/blog/sourceforge-infrastructure-and-s...

  [Disclosure: I work for SourceForge]

• by eCa on 7/18/15, 9:43 PM

  > made by an Extremely Massive Corporation who until now you've generally respected.

  As usual, one's respect for BigCompany is inversely correlated to one's use of their products.

• by nitrogen on 7/19/15, 4:01 AM

  One can hope that if this hypothetical public-facing service never returns, they will ship the backup tapes to the Internet Archive instead of Honest Bob's Social Data Mining and Market Manipulation.

• by amelius on 7/19/15, 1:07 PM

  > It writes a full 32 bits of numeric user ID to its filesystem, but to save a few bytes it only stores 16 bits of group IDs. Some engineer probably thought that'd be enough for anybody.

  I'm having the same issue with the number of hardlinks, which, for linux ext4 systems, is limited to 65000.

• by bootload on 7/19/15, 2:56 AM

  'all the knowledge about how to handle this moody piece of hardware is lost, like tears in the rain'

  Offworld, Roy Batty reference.

• by chris_wot on 7/19/15, 12:20 PM

  Yeah, they dealt with EMC. That's never going to go well.

  (continues reading)

• by simonebrunozzi on 7/18/15, 9:22 PM

  "Let's talk about a hypothetical public-facing service that offers tools for collaboration, revision control, and software publishing." - it was hard not to notice that he was referring to SourceForge. :)