Info about the Blog Server Situation
I only have a vague idea of who actually reads this blog. I know some of its readers are either part of the blog group that meets at the Berkman Center or other people who blog on this server. Many of those people might already know some of this background about the blog server. I imagine that most of you aren’t part of these groups, so you don’t know about some of the discussion that’s been happening in certain blogging circles over the last few months as problems with the blog server have seemed to knock Harvard’s blogs offline more and more frequently, including a few outages that lasted more than twelve hours.
The Redhead responded to some of the issues people have raised on her own blog today.
I just want to clarify so there’s no confusion that my post-crash blog posts are intended just as acknowledgement that the server has been down and not as criticism of the efforts of the folks at the Berkman Center. Some aggregators drop feeds when the server doesn’t respond after so many tries. Some readers might be confused by the disappearance of my blog–some thought I changed access to my blog so it’s restricted to certain users, others thought maybe I had stopped blogging in this space and the URL was no longer valid. I assure you, I’m still here. My apologies.
I know the Web team at the Berkman Center is short staffed, they’re still learning how to run the server, and they have a thousand other things they need to be doing, too. I don’t think the server has been any more erratic than it was before a recent personnel change. I learned a long time ago that Web services are never 100% 100% of the time. It’s great when they are. We can often forget the value of having good, reliable service. Yes, when the server goes down, I feel frustrated and disappointed both as a blog writer and a blog reader, but I keep in mind that sometimes servers fail, Web services go offline temporarily, and the server administrators will do what they can do to alleviate the problem.
Let me back up one thing Wendy has said and written: it is highly unlikely that the Berkman Center will just pull the plug on the blog server without giving us proper and advanced notification. They use Harvard blogs in their own work, so it wouldn’t be in their interest to just delete their own blogs. Some people are really concerned about their blogs magically disappearing. It is possible to backup a Harvard blog. Granted, it exports it as a Manila file another Manila server admin needs to load on a Manila server, but it’s better than not having anything at all.
Perhaps I have more insight into what’s happening because of my participation in blog group meetings where we frequently talk about these sorts of issues and future plans. Perhaps I have a little bit more patience because I have low expectations.
Addendum: Nate and Michael have also posted about the outage.
