A Hermes “thermal event” (2003) | Hacker News Reader

A Hermes “thermal event” (2003)

fanf2.user.srcf.net

25 pointsnetworked5 comments

To provide some context for the uninitiated: Hermes is Cambridge University's email system. The SRCF this page is hosted on is the 'student run computing facility' which provides certain sorts of hosting to students (it was where I first learned how to use a Linux command line).

I should add that the SRCF offers services to pretty much anyone at the University (or its colleges), including staff and of course the students you mentioned.

I am involved in running the SRCF nowadays. It's always encouraging to hear that it's been beneficial as an educational aid, as well as through pure utility!

Some people migrated their work pages to our web hosting from the University's equivalent service, which was abruptly shut down recently [0]. This follows an incident that got some attention on HN [1] -- chronologically at least, if not causally as well.

[0]: http://people.ds.cam.ac.uk/ [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20283922

That page dates from when we were moving our users off the old NetApp / Sun / UW-IMAP version of Hermes onto the new Linux / Cyrus version, with a 10x quota increase. My colleague David Carter had extended Cyrus with application-level replication, so our new mail storage architecture was (and still is) a sharded cluster with multi-site replication. David’s replication code was later adopted by Fastmail and incorporated into upstream Cyrus. It was pretty cutting-edge at the time. http://fanf2.user.srcf.net/hermes/doc/talks/2004-02-ukuug/

"In mid-April, I received a phone call from a Sun UK manager saying that Sun were upset by this web page and would like it to be taken down. Although it was down for a while, I have put it back since there is no reason to be embarrassed about a machine failing after five years of heavy use. And my boss likes this page better than he likes Sun."

Based on everything I've ever seen, "RED State Exception" was SUNW service code for "you'll be needing a new system board".

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