Day 87 - Metakgp Wiki goes down and comes back up; Script to snapshot each week

15 May 2017 100daysofwriting · books · metakgp · outage · wiki

Next up: Daughter of Time by Josephine Tey. I was going to read Dennis Lehane’s Mystic River (because Donna Tartt said that that was the book that pushed her to write Secret History), but it was about 350 or 450 pages or something, and I wanted to stick to smaller books which I can be reasonably sure I would complete than involve myself in a huge book which I would be rather skeptical about completing.

The setting for Daughter of Time is peculiar, apparently, it’s an analysis / investigation of a painting and a murder by an investigator on his hospital bed for 2 days (or more? The whole book, basically). I am a little nervous about whether I would like this book or not, the lethargy that is conveyed in the plot synopsis is part of the reason why. I am taking the plunge, nonetheless. (That book also featured in a major daily’s Top 100 Crime Novels list)

Metakgp’s Wiki went down some time around 2017-05-15 0930 +5.5. It was down for about 40 hours before being bought back up with a recovery read-only server and appropriate changes to the DNS records.

It was because of a kernel panic, it seems for now. We are tracking the incident on a issue at Github: metakgp/metakgp #17. One thing I was surprised with was the speed with which the update in the DNS records started showing up on my browser. (It was immediate) I wonder if that was because Cloudfare was doing some kind of magic with DNS propagation or because the browser got the correct DNS instead of the cached ones because of the earlier 500 responses from the cached one.

This also led to metakgp/metakgp #18: Snapshot the wiki droplet every week. The Digital Ocean API is rather powerful, and I have heard a lot about how people use it to add and remove droplets from their fleet depending on the load to their application. This particular functionality should be possible with a POST request and a DELETE requese. I am guessing that from the REST API assurance that DO seems to imply, I think it should be easy enough to write the script.

I have started writing it in Ruby and some part of it is done, I should be able to finish it off and deploy it this week. I have found that small tasks like these have an exponentially decreasing graph where the y axis is Enthusiasm to finish the task and the x axis is Time after ideation. Right now, the the x-axis is at 14 hours and my enthusiasm is above the threshold. We will see what becomes of that tomorrow morning.

POST #87 is OVER