I once managed a thoroughly non-critical server that lived in a closet. In the couple years I managed it, we had quite a few failures due to the UPS tripping and no unscheduled downtime at all from any other reason.

I’ve had massive problems with fancy (HPE, IIRC, but it wasn’t called HPE then) raid arrays caused by the controller being a POS. Using plain mdraid would have been far more reliable.

Sometimes I wonder if all the effort people put into protocols that run Paxos and Raft could be better spent running a small number of coordinator servers with manual failover. I’m suspicious that, in many use cases, leader elections cause failures more often than the leaders themselves fail.

>> "planes with two engines have twice as many failures as single engine planes"

Sounds like someone didn't understand redundancy...

> "planes with two engines have twice as many failures as single engine planes"

There has to be a smart reply to that, like: 100% of pilots of single engine planes don’t make it home after a single engine failure. 100% of pilots of dual engine planes do make it home after a single engine failure.

Planes are natural gliders and you can recover from engine failure. It's not like they just fall out of the sky.

say for the zoomy lawn darts we call fighters.

pushes glasses

If you lose an engine on a twin engine plane, you have to decide if you have an emergency or not. If you lose an engine on a single engine plane, you have to decide where you can make an emergency landing.