Give Google a Break!

By Andrew Miller in Reader

Posted in Linux on February 28, 2009 at 3:55 pm

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So I’m sure it hasn’t escaped people’s attentions that Google Mail had a little bit of downtime this week. A combination of my body clock being on the fritz and our internet connection being about as reliable as the average freelancer, meant that I missed most of it - thankfully.

This downtime certainly got Google a lot of press - because a *hell* of a lot of people use their services. I use Google Apps for all my domains on my server and would never turn back to hosting my own e-mail. I have used Google Apps for quite some time now and I can’t actually think of a single time where I’ve had any e-mail down time. So to have a few hours worth of down-time, in the grand scheme of things, is nothing - especially when you consider that Gmail is still a “Beta” (snigger…) and that it’s a completely free service. No e-mails were lost and you could still access them over POP3/IMAP, which takes 30 seconds to setup. So come on guys - give Google a break.

This still highlights an issue I bought up recently of our dependence on the internet and the cloud - as looking at my twitter feed, people were struggling left right and centre due to the lack of e-mail. Be prepared!

My internet service has been really troublesome the past few weeks (as mentioned) - we think due to noise on the line. However, BT gave us the run around and suggested that if they sent out an engineer and no fault was found it would cost us quite a bit of money. So we tried different filters, modems, cables and finally moved to BE Broadband, to eliminate the exchange as the issue. We’re on BE now and it seems fairly reliable (apparantly ADSL2+ is better at coping with noisy lines) but we’re getting about half the speed that we should, probably due to the line noise. So having eliminated all these issues, I think we’re confident enough to get a BT engineer involved. Here’s hoping!

Some of you may remember me recently talking about not wanting to upgrade from the Ubuntu 8.04 based Mint Linux on my primary machine. During this down-time I found the one thing that has made me want to upgrade - 3G Dongles. I’ve had to resort to using Ubuntu Intrepid inside a VirtualBox VM to work with the dongle I have for the times when the internet was just too unreliable. I’d really quite like to simply be able to plug it in and go, which Intrepid supports. Rummaging around my bits and bobs I found a 32GB SSD drive that Crucial sent me for an article a while back. So I’ve decided I’ll install Intrepid on to this and then casually move stuff across from my old install. After installing Intrepid on my girlfriends notebook last week (an experiment I’m watching eagerly), I was reminded that it doesn’t take long at all to get it setup with all the bells and whistles

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