Kyle's life in technology

Tuesday, March 07, 2006

Subversion again -- it's the simple things

Currently using Subversion 1.3 at my company.  Been using Subversion for 1.5 years as a team.  Put simply, it works.  It does one thing (versioning files & directories, merging, etc), does it well, does it reliably, and does it quickly.

It has never gone down aside from hardware outside the box going down (network switch failure, drive controller failure)

It has never corrupted any data.  Never.  Not once. 

The only administration I've ever done to it after setup has been adding/removing users permissions from the system. 

We have about 10,000 commits across three repositories.  We use FSFS backend right now, but used BDB for the first 9 months and never had a problem with it (running on a Windows 2000 server.)

It works well over VPN & even slower connections.  (tip:  use the mod_deflate option on Apache)

It's ... it's ...  beautiful.

WTF: why is clustering & redundancy so hard?

We've had way worse availability of our storage systems since we switched from per-box RAID to a SAN.  And cute little notes from the vendor like, "We've discovered a flaw in our firmware.  If you don't [take your production systems out for two hours] and upgrade it within the next 7 business days, we will no longer support you."  Maybe we'll switch vendors.

We're also using a database clustering technology.  Cool thing though is that when one node goes down, it takes the other one out without fail.  Very consistently.  From a major reputable vendor.  Why?  Got me.  Getting better I think though, upgrades, etc.  Too bad it depends on the aforementioned SAN.

We're using an application cluster from a reputable vendor.  Unfortunately, the tool that manages nodes/instances in the cluster tends to hang a lot.  Which may or may not mean a node is down.  When a node goes down, it is typical for us not to know about it other than seeing our performance fall into the basement.  And of course, when we try to fix, we can't, because the node manager is down.  We upgraded two major versions last year, and it got worse, not better.

Can I just say WTF?????