Ooops, up again, great...

[Frank Cox]

Two weeks ago we had a couple of nights that got down to -54, days around -40 or so. Almost nobody came to the shows those nights, of course, because their cars would freeze up while they were here. What a difference a couple of weeks makes: right now it's -4 and yesterday the snow was melting...

[Bobby Henderson]

I'm out on that -40°F stuff. That's almost cold enough for you to spit in the air and have it freeze by the time it hits the ground. I think that's supposed to be able happen at -50°F. When I was a kid I was able to experience -23°F on Christmas Eve in Syracuse, NY. The high temperature Christmas Day was a balmy 0°F.

[Mike Blakesley]

We had a five-day stretch last week where the thermometer didn't climb above zero at all. The "peak" cold was -39 or -41, depending on who you ask. Here in town, everybody looks at the time-n-temp clock on the bank, and the lowest temp I saw on that was -31. The absolute worst was out on 'the flat" east of town, where there are no hills to stop the wind. Out there it was below zero AND windy.

The cool thing was, one week after that -31, the temperature was 80 degrees higher and it felt like mid summer outside, even though it was only 49 degrees.

It's been a fairly normal winter for us in Montana, although in my part of the state (southeastern MT) we still have less snow than we normally would at this time of year. The ground is mostly bare right now.

[Marcel Birgelen]

Beats the crap out of any cloud thing-a-ma-jiggy!

You should always make backups, running something in the cloud is no excuse for not making backups.

The cloud can be good for some things, but is actually often more expensive than self hosting. Remember, the cloud is just someone else's computer, and you can have a better or worse setup than cloud providers. It seems that Brad has proper backups in place, and with the extraordinary events in Texas, an outage of a few days isn't unreasonable. I'm glad it's back, though - I had to resort to using an archived version of the site on the Internet Archive to get a couple of manuals I needed!

It highly depends on what you're doing. You can get some VPS that would be "good enough" for a few dollars per month. You can get two VPSes on two different hosters in two different sites for a few dollars more. It beats running some old hardware in some basement 9 out of 10 of the times. Remember: the hours support you put into the thing and the dollars added to your energy bill also count in the whole process.

If you have a lot of stuff to host, then self-hosting can be cheaper. Still, always take into account the time and money you need to spend to keep things up. To make proper backups, etc., etc.

[David Ferguson]

The cloud can be good for some things, but is actually often more expensive than self hosting. Remember, the cloud is just someone else's computer, and you can have a better or worse setup than cloud providers. It seems that Brad has proper backups in place, and with the extraordinary events in Texas, an outage of a few days isn't unreasonable. I'm glad it's back, though - I had to resort to using an archived version of the site on the Internet Archive to get a couple of manuals I needed!

[Randy Stankey]

When the site went down for a day, I figured that it was due to power outages in Texas. After that, it would come back up but would only serve empty pages. I figured that the server had crashed.

Haven't you considered putting public stuff like your site and the forum onto some "cloud" server somewhere?

A few years ago, I helped administer a website and I created a script that backed up the entire site to my computer at home every night.
There was another guy in Alaska and a third in central Canada. With three backups in three different parts of North America, we figured it would take a zombie apocalypse to destroy all three copies. At least one of the three of us would be able to restore the site or, if need be, re-point the address to another server and rebuild the site at a new location.

Beats the crap out of any cloud thing-a-ma-jiggy!

[Marcel Birgelen]

Interestingly, around the same time the unexpected and unprecedented cold hit a large part of the southern United States, we also had a major dip in temperature here in large parts of Europe. While most of the infrastructure here is built to withstand those kind of temperatures as they used to be pretty common, it has been about 10 years now since we last had such cold weather... Now, just a week later, temperatures are like it's late April or May already... Apparently, we just had the warmest days in February on record...

Database corruption due to all the power issues this last week. The forums have been rolled back to last Sunday's backup.

Yeah, MySQL, PostgreSQL and the like don't appreciate it when the server you're hosting it on is blinking on and off into existence. Repairing broken databases can also be a major pain in the butt... I hope none of the gear broke. The last time we faced something similar, we eventually decided to just pull the plug, until everything was back stable again. Much of this equipment really doesn't like flaky power situations and a UPS will only get you so far.

Haven't you considered putting public stuff like your site and the forum onto some "cloud" server somewhere? Not that the cloud is without problems, but at least most Texas DCs seem to have made it through the ordeal, mostly unharmed.

[Leo Enticknap]

I'm thankful things here on the North side of the Red River didn't turn out nearly as bad as they did in Texas.

I feel a bit guilty noting that in Southern California, you'd have had no idea that there has been any unusual weather anywhere else in the country if you weren't keeping an eye on the news media, or had your coronavirus vaccine appointment rescheduled (deliveries were disrupted, apparently). Temperatures, wind, and precipitation have all been bang on the long term average for this time of year over the last couple of weeks. It's still a little strange to realize that I'm just half a day's drive from where there has recently been life threatening extreme weather, though, with no sign whatsoever of it here.

That's not to deny that we have infrastructure challenges, the big ones being water supply and wildfire prevention. Fingers crossed for a quick and effective recovery in Texas.

[Jim Cassedy]

Database corruption due to all the power issues this last week

it seems power and corruption often go together....

[Brad Miller]

Database corruption due to all the power issues this last week. The forums have been rolled back to last Sunday's backup.

[Jarod Reddig]

I figured it was a problem on my end and gave up for a bit lol. Glad it’s back.

[Bobby Henderson]

It's great to see Film-Tech back up and running again.

I'm thankful things here on the North side of the Red River didn't turn out nearly as bad as they did in Texas. We did have some rolling blackouts Monday last week and there was some disruption of water service in some areas, but nothing on a wide scale. But holy shit it was cold for these parts! Early Tuesday last week Lawton posted a new all time record low of -12°F. The temperature fell below zero here three times last week. We'll usually go ten years between the weather falling below zero even once. We were below freezing for 274 hours straight (that streak finally ended on Friday). The previous record was 96 hours. We had enough snow in the space of 3 days to beat two of our average winters. Given this is Oklahoma (a place where weather extremes are normal) we had a high temperature last Tuesday of only 12 and then 7 days later our high temp was 78. Some towns in this area were above 80.

Plumbers sure have one hell of a back log. There's thousands of homes and commercial properties with varying degrees of plumbing damage just in Comanche County. Even dozens of housing units aboard Fort Sill suffered serious levels of damage. Some of the military personnel won't be able to move back into their homes for three months the way the backlog looks.

[Leo Enticknap]

When the site went dark, I just assumed Brad had gone to Cancún. . .

Brad, please forgive me one exceptional violation of the no politics rule.

I gather that Senator Cruz is now in hot water ... unlike everyone else in Texas.

Great to see that F-T is back up, and hope that Brad is now managing to keep warm and dry.

[Harold Hallikainen]

I noticed that the main site was up, but the forums were down giving, as I recall, a 500 error.I normally see something like that when there is a PHP error, perhaps attempting to access a database that is not there.

Good to have the forum back!

[Mike Blakesley]

Film Tech is based in Texas so I'm sure Brad's server was caught in a power outage.