Vos Virtual Network

It appears that YouTube has gone down on Saturday morning (at 09:30AM Eastern Time), or is unreachable. Not sure how long the outage will last. I first noticed that some YouTube embedded flash videos where not showing up on my blog. So, tried to access youtube.com directly, and got this message:

Next I ran a DNS test using my trusted rebol console (and hit escape getting bored waiting for a youtube DNS response):

Still a little curious about what was going on, I ran some more advanced diagnostics:

DiG 9.2.4 <<>> -t A youtube.com
;; global options: printcmd
;; Got answer:
;; ->>HEADER<<- opcode: QUERY, status: SERVFAIL, id: 55581
;; flags: qr rd ra; QUERY: 1, ANSWER: 0, AUTHORITY: 0, ADDITIONAL: 0

;; QUESTION SECTION:
;youtube.com. IN A

;; Query time: 1818 msec
;; SERVER: 69.56.222.10#53(69.56.222.10)
;; WHEN: Sat May 3 06:56:59 2008
;; MSG SIZE rcvd: 29

That is a really slow DNS response. Trace-routes were failing from multiple sources? Is it really down, or is DNS just responding sooooo slooooowly that nobody can reach it? So that told me it could be taking 1818 milli-seconds for a DNS reply. Compared to 1 msec for google.com, and 43 msec for vvn.net. Yep, that confirms it. Something is happening with YouTube this morning.

I ran more tests from multiple sources just to check/confirm response times around the globe (using Host Tracker). Yep, YouTube is having trouble this morning:

If you know what’s going on, or what happened, please leave a comment. More later…

Updates (these are my updates as I hear about them, not necessarily an exact chronology of events or blog alerts this morning):

09:02AM (or is that 10:02) Paul McNamara at NetworkWorld News said his 6 year old son Max scooped the story, and published YouTube is Down, Everybody Panic.

10:13AM Mashable also reported YouTube down around the globe, about 6 minutes ago.

10:23AM Center Networks is speculating that a DNS hack is the culprit.

10:30AM It appears that YouTube.com is back online from my location, but still unreachable from many locations around the globe [responses: 12 Ok 33 Fail live report @10:30AM] (not reachable from Argentina, Brazil, France, Russia, and several major US cities, etc.)

10:41AM Chemboy at nerdsrule seems a little too happy that YouTube went down.

10:48AM I think Khyri got the real scoop, on what happened when she ran a Whois query.

11:11AM YouTube is working great from my location in Detroit. However, YouTube is “still down” (because of DNS trouble) at many locations around the globe - responses: 17 Ok 22 Fail

12:44PM Looks like YouTube DNS is fixed. Only Brazil having trouble - responses: 40 Ok 1 Fail

Tags: DNS, outage, trace route, youtube

Scenario: You are finally convinced that Ruby on Rails is a great platform for building web applications, and so you try it out and build this awesome new website in only 3 weeks of development. You launch version 0.99 beta and everyone thinks it’s cool. Maybe it’s something like Insoshi, or Twitter. (Insoshi is hot new social networking platform (FOSS) written in Ruby on Rails (RoR). Yes, they eat their own dog food.)

Scene 2: TechCrunch posts an article telling the world about your cool RoR Open Source Social Networking stuff. This is great free publicity, but can your application handle the TechCrunch effect? Will your RoR Social Networking application be able to handle the spike in traffic? Can you handle the success of becoming a very popular new application? (Rumor mill… Twitter is having scaling problems… said to be abandoning Ruby on Rails. However DHH, the master architect of RoR, joined Twitter as D2H on 29-Apr-2008, and instantly had over 1200 followers.)

Scene 3: Slashdot comes back online after being down for 5 hours, and someone posts an article about your hot beta site — sez its cool. Will it suffer from the Slashdot effect? How will your application perform under peak load? Does it scale up to handle thousands or millions of hits per hour?

Scene 4: You can’t handle the TechCrunch effect and Slashdot effect all on the same day. Your web site crashes and burns. Your dream, website, and reputation is ruined — all in one day.

Scene 5: You wake up from the nightmare. It was only dream. It’s morning. You make some coffee and read the technology news. You check out the new Ruby on Rails performance monitoring tool from New Relic, and you listen to the Mashable podcast interview of Lew Cirne, founder and CEO of New Relic. Lew says they wrote the New Relic performance monitoring tool using Ruby, so he’s proud to say they eat their own dog food.

Scene 6: You get back to work — a little wiser.

Tags: RoR, Ruby, ruby on rails, twitter

Gregg Pollack and Jason Seifer from RailsEnvy.com do some Ruby on Rails commercials in the same style of the Mac vs PC ads. Videos produced by Jason Hawkins of MakeFilmWork.com.

The video is kind of funny, and does reveal some tidbits of truth about the complexity of enterprise java development. But those who have been reading about Ruby and JRuby for a while realize that you can run Ruby and Ruby On Rails with Java.

But if you think about it… guess that goes to show you there’s a-lotta-truth here.

Tags: java, Mac, rails, RoR, Ruby, ruby on rails, video

Thin is a Ruby web server that glues together 3 Ruby libraries:

1. the Mongrel parser, the root of Mongrel speed and security
2. Event Machine, I/O library with high scalability, performance and stability
3. Rack, a minimal interface between webservers and Ruby frameworks

So, Thin is the new dog in town. Did I mention that Thin is fast and flexible?

Thank-you Marc Cournoyer !

Tags: comparison, mongrel, rails, RoR, Ruby, ruby on rails, web server

This one (Mongrel onepointonepointone ) is just a little bug fix, fixing the Mongrel 1.1 mongrel_rails restart bug. Mongrel is a web server, that is cooler than a brick, and if you have used TomCat in the past, or heard of TomCat, you might understand the inside joke (TomCat vs. Mongrel (Dog)).

Most of the cool people who understand this stuff (wink, wink), are letting the cat out of the bag, because a dog is man’s best friend. But this really not really not a cat-fight, or even Cat vs. Dog fight, since even the guy who wrote TomCat has switched to Mongrel.

Update 10-Apr-2008:  Mongrel foot prints lead here now.

Tags: proxy, Ruby, Web 2.0, web development, web server

Have you checked out the new Yahoo Pipes!

It is a like an “RSS feeds on steroids”. Pipes is an interactive feed agregator and manipulator. Using Pipes, you can create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant.

Tags: RSS, Web 2.0

CMS Wire is reporting live from RubyConf and covers a few talks delivered at RubyConf. Sounds like the conference is buzzing with excitement and here a few items I gleaned…. Checkout Ruby on Rails Cheat Sheets, great little documentation things that help you get your work done… kind of like MAN pages, but a little more dynamic.

The PeepCode ScreenCasts are also highly recommended… “PeepCode Screencasts are a high-intensity way to learn Ruby on Rails website development”.

Wait a minute!!! That RubyConf is not the REAL RailsConf — which will happen May 17 to 20, 2007 — check it out on the RailsConf website.

Tags: RoR, Ruby