It seemed like such a good idea at the time… get a server in Iceland where there’s lots of Green Data Centre cooling (just open the windows and let the cold air in) and lots of Green power.
The data centre housing the SMS and Cluster services is only 31km from the town of Grindavik were there are signs of an imminent volcanic eruption. Who knows if the data centre will be affected or not. I do have an alternative site to move the services to if there are problems. Just be aware there could be disruptions to the service.
Thanks Andy for this information. Old OM’s such as myself who are not conversant with modern tech. may not have understood what was going on. Paul. M0CQE.
If there is a major eruption in or close to Grindavic the geothermal powerstation by the “Blue Lagoon” may well be forced to close down, which would be likely to impact the server. It already appears that rifting has effectively destroyed Grindavic even if the actual eruption is elsewhere.
You’d hope they have a mirror or some kind of fallbak system for times of disruption.
Although it could be a second data centre 1 km down the road which wouldn’t help in this case.
…31km is quite a distance from Grindavik so fingers crossed it won’t be an issue, otherwise that will be some eruption!
I’m sure that whilst it’s not nice for the people of Grindvik, Icelanders will be used to eruptions and the disruption. I was more concerned there could be power issues. Or if there’s sufficient ash then that could affect the natural fresh air cooling used.
Things like this are always good at poking you into making sure there are backups etc. and the backups are not in the same place as the live files.
Well the main SOTA stuff runs on a cloud provider and uses all modern ideas like direct pushing from a source control system. The SMS / cluster is much more old school like me. The software is saved in github but the deployment is manual. The biggest problem is normally not having a backup but remembering all the steps to get from an empty directory to a working system. I spent a moment reflecting on that this afternoon… change DNS to point to new server, change telephony provider to point at new server, copy source to server, install 3rd party libs to server, push the big green “go” button. Puzzle as to why it doesn’t work
There’s lots and lots of computing infrastructure in Iceland (green energy) so you’d hope people with real investments (not hobbyist stuff) would have volcano rather higher up the risks than you would normally expect. We’ll find out maybe over the coming days.
