Behind the Scenes At Sony's NOC 49
VonGuard writes "Earlier this year, I spoke to Mark Rizzo, the man who manages the people who run Sony's online game servers. Rizzo learned the ropes of MMO hosting back on Ultima Online, and we chatted about where the tough problems were then versus now. Rizzo compares the operation to a 24/7 scientific simulation, albeit with some sassier and more involved end-users. His favorite innovation since those early days? Rapidly provisioning and deploying Linux installations tailor-made to their purposes. Here's my article on Rizzo and his band of 50-some-odd sysadmin-cum-dungeon-masters, written for the new newspaper The Systems Management News."
Summary: We have scripts (Score:5, Funny)
Fascinating!
sysadmin-cum-dungeon-masters (Score:5, Funny)
Anyone else have images of S&M runnin through their minds?
Re:Summary: We have scripts (Score:3, Funny)
Re:sysadmin-cum-dungeon-masters (Score:5, Funny)
kill (1000+('od -An -N2 -i
Oh, you like that don't you!? Want me to do it again? First, I'm going to show you what a real glob is..
Arr Eye Zee Zee Oh (Score:1, Funny)
Re:sysadmin-cum-dungeon-masters (Score:3, Funny)
So anyone working on Sony's MMO division is a cum-dungeon bitch.. err.. minion now?
Promotion Strategy. (Score:5, Funny)
Taking a few management tips from in-game, perhaps?
cum-dungeon-masters TAG! (Score:0, Funny)
Re:Arr Eye Zee Zee Oh (Score:1, Funny)
Funny mis-read ! (Score:1, Funny)
Yeah, I have a scary mind. Boo !
Re:sysadmin-cum-dungeon-masters (Score:1, Funny)
Re:Would love to hear more from these teams (Score:5, Funny)
The secret to achieving five nines uptime is not to improve the reliability of the systems, but instead to be very careful about how you define "uptime".
"Hey, about those two hours of downtime last night..."
"There wasn't any downtime."
"No, really, the phones were lit up with people complaining that the applications weren't answering properly..."
"So the applications were answering queries? Then they were up. It's not downtime."
"But they were answering queries with error messages."
"Then that's an application problem. The system was still up."
"But the error messages said 'No response from database'. The database servers were down."
"No they weren't. They were still running. They still had power. The servers were up. It's not as if they fell down out of the racks. You can't call it downtime just because a few programs aren't behaving exactly the way you want."
"So about this SLA..."
"Five nines, baby. We've still got five nines."
Re:Summary: We have scripts (Score:2, Funny)