[Newspoetry] outage

[Joe Futrelle]

Newspoetry's cluster of 1,483 Pentium III servers each with 128GB of
RAM and 12TB of disk space crashed earlier today when a Newspoetry
worker inadvertently cut one of the extremely-high-speed fiber-optic
lines connecting the cluster to the web-enabled toaster oven in the
Newspoetry break room.  This resulted in a temporary outage of
Newspoetry.com.  Once we restored our toast and browning capabilities
we had to reboot all of the machines in the cluster (which required
clicking "OK" on 1,483 dialog boxes) and the Newspoetry service came
back up.  We are now back up to 99% capacity (a couple of servers are
insisting that we download new versions of Netscape, RealPlayer, and
Minesweeper VR 2002) and expect to be able to catch up with our
approximately 2,435,000 online orders for Newspoetry merchandise and
still be able to ship it all for Xmas delivery.

--
Joe Futrelle
Editor-within-chief,
Newspoetry dot com