RaQ status report
Added 2023-04-06 18:48:35 +0000 UTCIt has been just under a week since our Cobalt RaQ 3 server appliance went live on the Internet! We wanted to post an update just for our Patreon members to give you all a behind-the-scenes peek into how the RaQ has handled the modern internet.
Once the Part 3 video went live, the RaQ handled the traffic well. The RaQ was never designed for the challenges of the modern internet as the threat landscape was very different in the Y2K days. We opted to employ the protection services of Cloudflare to ensure the RaQ would stay online.
We've seen bursts of traffic as news has spread about the RaQ. It has been posted on both Slashdot (https://tech.slashdot.org/story/23/04/05/2142204/museum-puts-decades-old-cobalt-raq-back-on-the-internet) as well as HackerNews (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35468637).
This ultimately culminated in our first real outage that lasted for 23 minutes:
The RaQ was overwhelmed, and we were seeing errors where the Apache HTTP server was unable to fork new processes:
This ended up being caused by a setting dictating how many server daemon processes could simultaneously run. The default was at 256, and the little AMD K6-2 300MHz CPU couldn't quite keep up! We reduced this value, and the web server was back up and stable.
We may put together a retrospective video on the events of this past week, but we wanted to give you all a quick look at what's been going on. It's been really cool to see the guestbook responses from ALL over the world, literally. We've had visitors from over 40 different countries, and that really speaks to just how popular these Cobalt RaQs were and how they're still interesting even decades later.
Thanks again for coming along with us and we have tons of more content in the works and on the way!
