Next Firmware Update on the ALP will be on 6/5/14

[beingaware]

I don't think it's as trivial as that to set up additional instances of their web app that generates setup.alp files or produces firmware tailored to your CPU. We have no knowledge about what part of their infrastructure went down. As I said, the static files on alpupdate.com are still up. It's something in the backend that failed. And HA clustering is not trivial to integrate with your apps, and nor is rsync a valid or coherent way to back up a web app atomically to an alternate server, nor is it always a simple job to restore from such an archive of a working website.

Note that I'm not really defending the downtime either. It's horribly disruptive to ALP customers. We now can't change any nontrivial on our ALP setup because they decided the most logical way to generate config files is via a website that's now down. However, it is one of my pet peeves in the tech world that internet commenters tend to overly trivialize running infrastructure and believe they know how to run it better than others.

Not really.

I have Exchange, AD, FS, SQL, TMG all cluster on VMware ESX across two datacentres.
It can even blow out core switches and keep on trucking.
The staff don't even notice as its seemless.

Web is much easier to sync and sql is pretty easy compared to other services .
Using VSS and then pushing those up with something like EMC is very easily doable for having quick turn around on backup of a failed box.
Blow up a new vm, hell have a hot stand by image.
Drop the last snapshot onto it, and bang, you are back online in less then 15 minutes.

my biggest pet peev is companies that fail to invest even a few thousand on HA and then either;
A, whinge they had a failure, then press on the helpdesk guys to hurry us Admins up.
B, take forever to come back online if out sourced
or
C, affecting customer bases. (again out sourced).

Kind regards,
Beingaware,
CCNP R&S, Voice, Datacentre, ASA
VCP5-DCV
RHCSA
MCITP 2008/2012
ITILv3
B.Sc

We done with our pissing match?