Oh, the Irony

OpenBSD 3.5 implemented a protocol called CARP, a redundancy protocol designed to make multiple hosts share a virtual network address. This is a reliability thing: if you have one host and it crashes, you have a problem. If you have two hosts that can tag team with CARP and one of them crashes, you still have a problem but there is no interruption in service because you still have a host that's up and running.

CARP got a good reception, and it wasn't long before there were efforts to port OpenBSD's CARP protocol to FreeBSD and Linux. There's even a project out there called CARP for UNIX. It lives at http://www.ucarp.org and touts "High-availability for Linux and Unix with CARP". I found it once, gleaned it briefly, bookmarked it for later, and moved on.

Today, on a lark, I decided to revisit the page and see if there have been any updates. I'm greeted with this:

"Hard disk death

"Jan 31, 2006.

"This server's hard disk is dead. Nothing can be read any more from it, and it keeps doing odd clicks. I tried almost everything to recover it today, and the heads keep clicking without reading any data.

"For the record, the hard disk was a 40 Gb Seagate Momentus. I bought it 1.5 years ago. The SMART status was always okay, without any error. But last morning, that drive killed itself.

"I used to backup the data from that server every week, on another host. But last week, I needed some space for a specific application. And I temporarely [sic] deleted the backup. 2 days later, the disk died. And that host was always backuped for 5 years before. Call it Murphy's law or voodoo, but it really, really, really sucks."

I feel really bad for the guy, as he goes on to lament the importance of the drive and the all-but-until-recent diligence of his backup procedures. This is always a bad place to be. But I find it quite ironic that the website for CARP for UNIX was lost because someone didn't have a redundant server and didn't actually use CARP for UNIX. I mean, everyone else sees it. Right?