When Wikipedia goes down Options Rating

[thekohser]

English Wikipedia (and Meta, and French Wikipedia, and Wikiversity, but strangely not Wikiquote) seems to have a server down right now. Anybody else notice this? Additionally, I notice that on the "error" page the Foundation has also craftily mentioned:

The Wikimedia Foundation is a non-profit organisation which hosts some of the most popular sites on the Internet, including Wikipedia. It has a constant need to purchase new hardware. If you would like to help, please donate.

I wonder if they might be actually planning downtime deliberately, in order to drive up contributions?

[anthony]

Take a look at the server admin log (personally I'm subscribed to the RSS feed).

18:00 brion: things seem at least semi-working.

1. everything hung
2. suda had some kind of kernel crash
3. after reboot, it was found to have a couple flaky disks
4. brion hacked up MW config files to skip the NFS logging
5. mark set up an alternate /home NFS server

15:00 mark: Site down completely. Post-mortem:

1. Rob is untangling power cables in rack B2, and both asw-b2-pmtpa and asw3-pmtpa (in B4) lose power
2. Two racks unreachable, PyBal sees too many hosts down and won't depool more
3. Rob brings power to asw-b2-pmtpa back up, but connectivity loss to B4 is not noticed
4. Mark investigates why LVS isn't working, adjusts PyBal parameters, until PyBal pools not a single server
5. Apaches are unhappy about completely missing ES clusters
6. Connectivity loss to B4 discovered, restored
7. Site back online

There is an oversighted edit though, that read:

14:45 godwin/gardner: Prepare downtime donation message and take a hammer to a few hard drives.

Just kidding.