[rhn-users] RHN down; again

[Eric Eisenhart]

Chris Stankaitis wrote:
> Keep in mind I have no access to red hat servers beyond the other normal 
> RHN users out there but with Update 3 being released this morning 
> chances are everyone and their dog are all trying to patch their systems 
> at once.... Chill out, lay off the Bawls... mellow out a bit and try 
> back later, this happens every time RH releases an update and/or new ISO's.

And if it was really slow, that would be sufficient explanation...  If 
this was the first and only time, that'd be another thing entirely... 
Yes, it costs more money (mostly in hardware) to make services fault 
tolerant and with some applications load-tolerance is tricky; but what 
I'm saying is that Red Hat should be making those sorts of things happen 
with RHN.  Having RHN be slow when there's a major new round of updates 
would be much less annoying.

Also, given that most people already using the "rhnsd" (and possibly 
also the little rhn applet) and all anybody can do now is hit a 
placeholder webpage, I'm having trouble seeing how the load is any 
higher than usual at the moment...  It's not like they announced update 
3 so that there's a lot of users actively pounding their site trying to 
get it...

I'd point you to the marketing phrases used on 
http://www.redhat.com/software/rhel/ -- but now that seems to be down, 
too.  They're pushing RHEL as an "Enterprise" product, customers are 
buying it as an "Enterprise" product, and RHN is a key component of 
RHEL.  RHN needs to be more reliable than this.  (and I simply don't 
believe that new updates have anything to do with www.redhat.com being 
down; I suspect it's related to the two afternoons/evenings of downtime 
earlier this week)

Chilling out is, of course, always a good idea. However, this (over an 
hour) downtime is putting a kink in at least two projects involving at 
least two different members of our systems administration group.  (We're 
RHN Proxy customers with a fair number of systems running RHEL and more 
migrating to RHEL; not people who just happen to be keeping a desktop or 
two patched)

I think Red Hat owes their customers at least some explanations about 
what's going on.
-- 
Eric Eisenhart <eric.eisenhart at sonoma.edu>
Linux/Unix Systems Administrator
Office: Schulz 1050A, (707) 664-3099
AIM: ericeisenhart, ICQ: 156218985
Sonoma State University, IT