Re: Recent partial Tarsnap outages

[Gabriel Kerneis <gabriel@kerneis.info>]

On Fri, Jan 15, 2010 at 03:03:27PM -0800, Colin Percival wrote:
> Unfortunately this approach does not work well in the context of
> persistent failures; so I have now revised the Tarsnap server code to
> handle an accounting subsystem failure by assuming that all users have
> positive account balances.  Consequently, even if the underlying error
> condition in SimpleDB recurs (whatever it might be), it will not have
> any impact on Tarsnap users.

Should this happen in the future, does the system:
- provide a free access to users during the outage, or
- record the debt and synchronise with SimpleDB as soon as it becomes
  available?  In that case, this means an account may end up with a
  negative balance, right?  Which makes me think: if a user tries to
  create too big an archive (w.r.t. its balance), is the connection
  dropped, or is it completed and the balance set to a negative amount?

Regards,
-- 
Gabriel Kerneis, happy user with a positive balance ;-)