Ma.gnolia User Data Is Gone For Good 450
miller60 writes "The social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia reports that all its user data was irretrievably lost in the Jan. 30 database crash that knocked the service offline. Ma.gnolia founder Larry Halff recently discussed the crash and the lessons to be learned from Ma.gnolia's experience. A lesson for users: don't assume online services have lots of staff and servers, and always keep backup copies of your data. Ma.gnolia was a one-man operation running on two Mac OS X servers and four Mac minis."
Re:Mac reliability (Score:5, Informative)
Transcript of interview (Score:5, Informative)
Rather than watch the video or download the 23MB MP3, you can read the full transcript here:
http://ratafia.info/post/78915439/transcript-and-commentary-for-whither-magnolia [ratafia.info]
I can read much faster than I can listen.
Re:Mac reliability (Score:3, Informative)
No, but Mac OS 10.5.x can properly be called Unix [opengroup.org], but only the Intel version, not the PPC version.
Re:Mac reliability (Score:3, Informative)
The best use I've ever had for the big Mac servers is running as a file server in a windows/mac environment. If you still have any pre-OS X machines around, that's about the only way to get them all on the same machine
Negatory - the best answer there is samba+netatalk. I did this at my house and then proceeded to do it again when I was the network admin at a spot with a mix of PCs and various-vintage Macs. Since you are generally running such a solution on a free Unix system (I did it on Linux both times) you also have access to pretty much ever other network filesystem too. Ostensibly it should be easy to add Appletalk DDP support to a modern Novell system running on SuSe, and it's definitely been done on various small Linux appliances. I was only doing NFS in addition to SMB and atalk, but you could have Coda, Andrew, etc etc.
Since Apple has fixed their stupid Apple-only filename convention bugs in the SMB client and some other retarded things you don't even have to use netatalk's Appleshare-over-IP functionality, but it does have that, too.
Re:Mac reliability (Score:5, Informative)
Yeah, but that's exactly the surprising part. Why would you pay Apple $3000 for a xserve running Apache and MySQL, with a crappy service contract (no next-day service, no on-site service-- I've looked into it), when you could buy an equivalent Dell server for $2100, running the exact same Apache and MySQL, and get a next-day and on-site service contract?
Anyone who buys an xserve is an idiot.
Re:Not the platform's fault... (Score:3, Informative)
With a transactional database who cares how long it takes - the state isn't going to change. If you're backing up your 500GB MyISAM tables, well, you're asking for trouble. Since you mention MySQL, use innodb tables with the dump option "--single-transaction".
Re:Mac reliability (Score:3, Informative)
Um, how is that relevant? MS isn't using those minis to run an internet service of any sort, they're using them for brute force automated testing of a desktop application that was specifically designed to run on desktop-class Macs.
Re:Mac reliability (Score:5, Informative)
Fine; what company do you trust? HP? IBM? Replace "Dell" with them, and my example still applies. The fact is, *every* server vendor can do better than Apple. Even IBM does better, and they suck.
Oh, and BTW, all servers will have hardware problems from time-to-time. When that happens with your Dell, HP, IBM server, the guy is there in his truck in 4 hours. When that happens to your Apple server, you're SOL.
Re:Mac reliability (Score:3, Informative)
> I bet you can get apache running
Every Mac comes with apache - "getting it running" means checking a single box in the system preferences dialog.
Same goes for Samba for example.
!equivalent (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Mac reliability (Score:5, Informative)
Except its the same hardware...well no, that's not true. You can get a Dell with actual hardware RAID when you're stuck with software RAID on an Xserve.
Furthermore Dell also has a 4-hour onsite 24/7 support package if I'm not mistaken.
I love my MacBook and the OS X desktop experience but you simply can't use an Xserve on business critical operations.
Re:Mac reliability (Score:3, Informative)
But that's more of a PR thing than anything. If I raise cows in the pasture behind my hose then they aren't "USDA Certified Organic" or any other such thing, but that doesn't really change what they are - it just means the haven't been inspected an labeled by some committee.
Same with Mac OS X being "Unix". It's more of a stamp of approval than anything.
Re:Mac reliability (Score:3, Informative)
It would appears so:
Memory
* 800MHz DDR2 ECC fully buffered DIMM (FB-DIMM) memory
* Eight FB-DIMM slots support up to 32GB of memory
* 256-bit-wide memory architecture
Re:Mac reliability (Score:5, Informative)
Even IBM does better, and they suck.
One morning I came in and was looking at the logs. SMART was reporting that one of the disks in one of the servers was going to go bad soon. Not 15 minutes after i even noticed this in the logs, an IBM tech was there with a fresh one ready to replace it.
How? The server called home, told IBM about the error, and they disbatched a tech immediately.
If that "sucks", your service must come with free hookers or something.
Re:Mac reliability (Score:5, Informative)
a crappy service contract (no next-day service, no on-site service-- I've looked into it)
Not very hard, apparently.
http://www.apple.com/server/support/ [apple.com]
You get 24/7 telephone and email support with 30-minute response. For hardware repairs, Apple-certified technicians provide onsite response within four hours during business hours and next-day onsite response when you contact Apple after business hours.
Re:Mac reliability (Score:4, Informative)
This is meaningless today. Most Unixlike systems today are not certified Unix systems.
OS X has some significant differences from traditional Unixlike systems and Linux - not necessarily disadvantages:
You can certainly add grid computing software to other operating systems. OS X is missing some functionality that a "regular linux server" may have. Even when considering third-party software, there are many things that can be done in Linux but not in OS X.
Mac OS X security updates certainly are "all or nothing" - you have to install all of the patches included in the package or install none of them. Each package includes many fixes, and sometimes they break things [slashdot.org]. The updates are not available as individual pkacages. You cannot select which updates are applied to the system.
RHEL/CentOS has point releases, but there are plenty of individual package updates in between (to fix bugs, compatibility, and security issues.) Individual package updates are released when they are ready, not as part of a large security update bundle or a monthly schedule.
Re:Mac reliability (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, I priced it out after writing that post, and IBM is not only beating Apple, but is competitive with Dell on the mid-high end of rackmount servers. Much of the reason is that Apple nickel-and-dimes you to death-- for example, they charge you an additional $200 for a secondary PSU which all Apple's competitors in that range have the second PSU as standard equipment (IBM, Dell, HP.)
Equivalent hardware to a basic $3000 xserve from IBM is about $2700, and that includes 2 PSUs and better service.
Re:Mac reliability (Score:3, Informative)
Six Sigma is a quality methodology.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Six_sigma [wikipedia.org]
In short, you use statistical methods to improve quality to a target goal of no more than 3.4 defects per million opportunities. There's a process you go through - define, measure, analyse, improve, control (DMAIC), and the analysis part is kind of fun for the mathematically-inclined.
You can go as high as twelve sigma, which is some ridiculously small defect rate used in aircraft engineering (for example).
I'm a Six Sigma Green Belt, although it's been a couple of years since I've used it.
Re:Mac reliability (Score:4, Informative)
It means you don't have to pay the performance penalty that netatalk has from resource fork handling since HFS+ is a native file system.
So if you're dealing with lots of small files with both forks, you're going to pay a penalty. What that says to me is that there are certain limited cases in which you might still need to use an Apple fileserver for performance, but in almost every real-world case where you actually have macs as clients, is it really an issue?
Re:Mac reliability (Score:3, Informative)
I'm as much of a Mac fanboy as the next guy, but I do want to point out that the "on-site" service isn't as amazing as it sounds.
I have a Mac Pro and recently discovered that the on-site service is provided at the discretion of the local store/repair center and not Apple. If you call with a problem and want on-site service for it, they'll give you a list of local stores that you can then call and try and convince them to come out on a Saturday (it doesn't work, btw). I imagine if you bought all your systems from a place they'd be more interested, but just as a random guy with AppleCare -- the earliest I could arrange was some 36 hours later at an Apple Store (that Mac Pro was fun to lug on the subway, too).
It's a great computer and all of that, but if you have business critical needs, you need something way more than AppleCare.