This article is more than 1 year old

Wait, what? The Linux Kernel Mailing List archives lived on ONE PC? One BROKEN PC?

Yup: LKML.org and all its records of the planet's most-used OS were on one disk

Spare a thought for Jasper Spaans, who hosts the Linux Kernel Mailing List archive from a single PC that lives in his home. And since things always happen this way the home machine died while he was on holiday.

The lkml.org archive was therefore unavailable for much of the weekend, although Linux developers could still use mirrors like Indiana University's effort.

Spaans quickly learned of the outage and he said it was a simple issue, that a brief power outage – caused by an overflowing washing machine that tripped the breakers – left the server waiting for a Linux Unified Key Setup (LUKS) password to unlock the boot partition after its forced reboot.

But once he got home, it became apparent the problem was rather more serious.

The hardware Spaans needed appears to have arrived: in the 30 minutes The Reg worked on this story, lkml.org came back to full life.

But Spaans has recognised the need for a more robust replacement: in future the mailing list archive will move to a virtual private server somewhere. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like