Self-Repairing Computers 224
Roland Piquepaille writes "Our computers are probably 10,000 times faster than they were twenty years ago. But operating them is much more complex. You all have experienced a PC crash or the disappearance of a large Internet site. What to do to improve the situation? This Scientific American article describes a new method called recovery-oriented computing (ROC). ROC is based on four principles: speedy recovery by using what these researchers call micro-rebooting; using better tools to pinpoint problems in multicomponent systems; build an "undo" function (similar to those in word-processing programs) for large computing systems; and injecting test errors to better evaluate systems and train operators. Check this column for more details or read the long and dense original article if you want to know more."
ROC detail (Score:5, Informative)
Re:No clue (Score:5, Informative)
But I do that already... (Score:3, Informative)
This is called "the sysadmin thinks ahead."
Essentially, when any sysadmin worth a pile of
beans makes any changes whatsoever, he makes sure there's a backup plan before making his changes live. Whether it means running the service on a non-standard port to test, running it on the development server to test, making backups of the configuration and/or the binaries in question, or making backups of the entire system every night. She is thinking "what happens if this doesn't work?" before making any changes. It doesn't matter if it's a web server running on a lowly Pentium 2 or Google - the sysadmin is paid to think about actions before making them. Having things like this won't replace the sysadmin, although I can imagine a good many PHBs trying before realizing that just because you can back out of stupid mistakes, doesn't mean you can keep them from happening in the first place.
Re:10,000 times faster in 20 years? (Score:3, Informative)