I'm not affiliated with this genius. I was just snooping around the other thread (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45974012), took a chance at modifying the site's URL, and found myself pleasantly surprised.
Just thinking about it, wouldn't a distributed P2P "mesh" be a better fit for reliability probing? We could share results, see where it was inaccessible from. It's kind of an oxymoron to have a centralized down detector lol
The title reminds me of the 5th installment of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams:
"Further investigation quickly established what it was that had happened. A meteorite had knocked a large hole in the ship. The ship had not previously detected this because the meteorite had neatly knocked out that part of the ship's processing equipment which was supposed to detect if the ship had been hit by a meteorite."
The book ("Mostly harmless") and especially the beginning of the first chapter is worth reading as it describes how the automated systems of the space ship try to resolve the situation.
I think we need to make a highly-available downdetector from a collection of SBCs hosted around the world. Each node gets its configuration via git-pull which is self-hosted/republished. Simplest DNS configuration possible: each node has a unique $n.isdowndetectordown.ultradowndetector.com while they also happily host a common hostname with simple dns round robin entries for it.isdowndetectordown.ultradowndetector.com. The common page attempts to load a check resource (perhaps just a tiny css output?) from all of the $n.i.u.c nodes which just changes a div from gray to green/red.
It would be interesting to see just how small this whole thing could be; I bet it could be made into a <500MB sdcard image for a RaspberryPi4/2GB that simply updates a static css out of (say) cron and serves a surprising number of HN requests.
With all of this redundancy, there is no way it could fail! /s
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 53.0 ms ] threadThis one looks like it's behind a CDN, at least
"Further investigation quickly established what it was that had happened. A meteorite had knocked a large hole in the ship. The ship had not previously detected this because the meteorite had neatly knocked out that part of the ship's processing equipment which was supposed to detect if the ship had been hit by a meteorite."
The book ("Mostly harmless") and especially the beginning of the first chapter is worth reading as it describes how the automated systems of the space ship try to resolve the situation.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0587527
(Mel Brooks & Buck Henry)
It would be interesting to see just how small this whole thing could be; I bet it could be made into a <500MB sdcard image for a RaspberryPi4/2GB that simply updates a static css out of (say) cron and serves a surprising number of HN requests.
With all of this redundancy, there is no way it could fail! /s
As per usual, all new is something old, well-forgotten.
didnt check past that