Phasor Burn

I have to laugh. Sitting here reading blogs via bloglines.com on my iPhone and being presented with presumably targetted ads from Telus for Blackberry’s. LOL.

Well, yes it is. Between the MobileMe cloud (when/if it is working for you) and the iPhone, updates are PDQ indeed.

Approximately three seconds after typing this and hitting ENTER

$ echo “hello there” | mailx -s “no subject” redacted@me.com

it lands in my iPhone’s MobileMe account, complete with mail arriving ding/buzz alert.

I’m switching over to this instead of email-to-sms for my Nagios pages and see how that goes. I suspect it may be more reliable (snicker) and timely than going via my providers oft-overloaded email-to-sms gateways.

I’ve had messages by the old email-to-sms path delayed minutes, hours, days, or lost entirely. Almost exactly like what can happen with email, but I am pretty sure most of my delayed/lost Nagios pages were due to the sms gateway itself.

Anyways, we’ll have to wait for the next time the on call support person fails to tend to a Nagios alert right away. I’ve got it set up to start nagging me something like 45 min after it has been nagging the on call phone without being taken care of.

MobileMe: Important information regarding email service interruption
Last Modified: July 22, 2008
Article: TS1953
Symptoms
Updated: July 22, 2008, 4 p.m. PDT.

On Friday, July 18, 2008 (2008-07-18) we experienced a serious issue with one of our MobileMe mail servers. This issue is currently affecting approximately 1% of MobileMe members. Affected members are unable to send or receive email at www.me.com or access email using any email client software such as Mail on a Mac or Microsoft Outlook on a PC.

Products Affected
MobileMe Mail
Resolution
We understand this is a serious issue and apologize for this service interruption. We are working hard to restore your service.

Hmm, interesting. The troubled MobileMe rebranding and relaunch of the venerable dotMac service has yet another outage of sorts.

Reading the notice it appears they are using data sharding or otherwise splitting users between servers. Curious.

This is as opposed to having a bunch of front end servers, a middle tier of app servers, and a back end of storage. Any server in any tier can be asked to perform a task for any customer (load balanced of course).

Losing a server in that config wouldn’t cause a number of customers to be completely up shit creek. Worst case, everyone slows down a bit.

Fly away…. before the storm gets ya