GMail Experiences Serious Outage 408
JacobSteelsmith was one of many readers to note an ongoing problem with Gmail: "As I type this, GMail is experiencing a major outage. The application status page says there is a problem with GMail affecting a majority of its users. It states a resolution is expected within the next 1.2 hours (no, not a typo on my part). However, email can still be accessed via POP or IMAP, but not, it appears, through an Android device such as the G1." It's also affecting corporate users: Reader David Lechnyr writes "We run a hosted Google Apps system and have been receiving 502 Server Error responses for the past hour. The unusual thing about this is that our Google phone support rep (which paid accounts get) indicated that this outage is also affecting Google employees as well, making it difficult to coordinate."
Re:Depend on something... pay for admin (Score:4, Informative)
.. Simply use a mail gateway..
http://www.google.com/support/a/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=60730
Was that so hard?
Re:Indeed (Score:3, Informative)
So much for handing your email over to Google
We handed our mail over and it's the first time I've ever had a problem with them as a corporate mail provider. Almost two years. There may have been one other short outage, but I don't remember it being during business hours.
I doubt you could run a mail server more reliably. And, for the difference in cost, I'd stay with Gmail.
Just wanted to add that despite GMail's outage, POP was still working. Email on my iPhone was working the whole time, for example.
As far as outages go, that was pretty derned tame.
Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect (Score:0, Informative)
just get chewed out by your google boss?
Re:Indeed (Score:5, Informative)
I'm the guy that switched our email service to Google. See, it only costs us $50/year/user and this has been the first outage in over year...
Well, actually they had an outage in Feb of this year. And in May.
But they are awesome generally, I think their uptime over the past couple years has been beyond 99.99% or something crazy good.
-Taylor
Re:BREAKING: Snowstorm Proves Global Warming a Myt (Score:3, Informative)
I'm sure there's slashdot readers for whom setting up (and maintaining) their own mail server is a short task done before breakfast without breaking a mental sweat.
Not really. The problem is that, as with most hard tasks, it's easy to trivialize in the abstract. In 10 seconds, I can type a command-line script that will answer port 25. In a slightly longer time I can pull down the appropriate packages for the Linux distro of choice and configure them with whatever domain name. In slightly longer, I can configure appropriate countermeasures and firewalling. Given budget and time, I can deploy a suite of additional features including redundancy (local and/or remote), various protocols for access to the mail, a Web front-end, calendaring, mailing list handling, archival, SOx-compliant retention management, monitoring, escalation paths, and so on...
Or I can sign up for Google Apps and have all of the above deployed in under a half hour for a company of nearly arbitrary size with customizations (logo, URLs for local support, internal documentation updates, etc.) being done within a week and larger-scale work (changing deployment manifests for new systems to ensure compatible browsers and pre-configured IMAP clients, etc.) being done over the course of the next month or two in conjunction with other parts of the organization.
After running my own mail servers for a decade, I finally gave in and went the Google route for my personal domain, and I'd recommend it for any size organization. There are pitfalls. You'll have to adapt or replace pieces of what Google gives you (their mailing list management is atrocious). But I feel that the work they leave in your lap is a very small trade-off given what you get.
Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect (Score:2, Informative)
No, it's not useful for that purpose. "Ya'll" is a colloquial contraction of "you will" (i.e., a colloquial form of "you'll"), and isn't particularly Southern as far as I know.
The second-person plural pronoun often used in Southern speech is "y'all"--a contraction of "you all."
Re:Anti-Slashdot Effect (Score:3, Informative)
This really isn't all that odd. "Y'all" may LOOK like a contraction of "You all" (because really, it is), but it has become lexicalized in several dialects of English. It now functions as a single word that is the standard second person plural personal pronoun.
So just as you can get "he'll", you can also get "Y'all'll". The GP misspelled it. :)
Bar code dialect (Score:3, Informative)
Plural second person future perfect:
all'ya'll'll've
Usage:
All'ya'll'll've been doin' it wrong if all'ya'll do what yer plannin' on doin'.
Re:Indeed (Score:3, Informative)
You're confusing cause and effect. Presumably your organization is running on Windows Small Business Server (IT people shudder when they hear that name for a reason) and so when Exchange goes down, it does cause problems for SBS, and vice versa.
However, if you take Exchange out of the equation, or if you give it nothing to do, then all your domain problems go away. Now instead of having 4 hours of downtime you get about 1 hour every three years. (that's been about my experience overall with Gmail, of course YMMV).
With SBS, if Exchange has a problem, everyone has a problem. With SBS, if Exchange is neutered, you have a LOT less problems.