Posted: Tue Nov 16, 2010 12:48 pm Post subject: Website now checks for broken mirrors
Although we receive very few e-mail support requests, we have noticed that most of such e-mails mention that they are unable to download NeoOffice so I checked each of our mirrors this morning and found that two large mirrors have not synched their mirror properly even though they were properly synched in the past.
Since it is hard to predict when a mirror will be down or unusable, I have added code to our website that does a quick check to see if the requested mirror is up and responding to web requests. If a mirror is found to be unusable, our website code will redirect your web browser to the first mirror in the list that is responding to web requests.
If anyone still finds that downloads do not work from our website, please let us know and we will investigate the problem.
Patrick
Last edited by pluby on Fri Feb 24, 2012 9:55 am; edited 1 time in total
Huh? So where is the "bad code" that you infer about? To be blunt, your comment sounds a bit offensive because it implies that our volunteer mirrors (who fund 95% of the bandwidth costs of our non-donors) don't know what they doing and they have 100% uptime.
The problem is that one of the volunteer mirrors goes offline for a while. All that my recent code change does is try to buffer users from this inevitable event. Running a high bandwidth mirror is no simple task and many of the volunteer mirrors also mirror software like OpenOffice.org and other high volume open source software. We don't control the volunteer mirrors, but I can guess that many are under massive loads day in and day out.
From my experience, our volunteers are run by professionals and their servers remain up at least 99.9% of the time but to expect none of them to ever go down is frankly unrealistic.
Serves me right for punning out of context - all I had in mind was an innocuous play on words that a broken mirror means 7 years' bad luck, and that broken mirrors in this sense could mean people stuck with older versions of an app (which is, relatively speaking, a 'bad' thing - not that the code was bad, just 'less good').
No offence meant at all, but I can see how it might strike you that way, and so I apologise for any bad taste it left in your mind, regardless of intention.
Serves me right for punning out of context - all I had in mind was an innocuous play on words that a broken mirror means 7 years' bad luck, and that broken mirrors in this sense could mean people stuck with older versions of an app (which is, relatively speaking, a 'bad' thing - not that the code was bad, just 'less good').
No offence meant at all, but I can see how it might strike you that way, and so I apologise for any bad taste it left in your mind, regardless of intention.
Ah. I get it now. No harm done. Where I missed your pun is that 7 years is roughly how long we have had NeoOffice available for free downloads. That coupled with "bad code" made me totally misread your post.
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