Earlier quoted context omitted.
"in theory, there's no difference between theory and practice. "
... but in practice, there is. - Jan van de Snepscheut
But in practice, theories are only hypotheses, which at best can just be falsified ;)
Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006)
41–50 of 88 posts
Re: Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006)
#42Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not forgetting the classic "magic / more magic" switch: http://catb.org/esr/jargon/html/magic-story.html
Or the email server that couldn't send emails more than 500 miles: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
First time hearing this story, and also just discovered `units` which I really love :)
Re: Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006)
#43Wacky story, but this is very typical. They had unsecured wireless devices attached to thier network. A misconfigured device, misconfigured due to the hurricane, ended up causing internal problems. I muust ask, why was a wifi device so ready to connect to some random device? Be glad this wasnt a rogue device.
Re: Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006)
#44Wacky story, but this is very typical. They had unsecured wireless devices attached to thier network. A misconfigured device, misconfigured due to the hurricane, ended up causing internal problems. I muust ask, why was a wifi device so ready to connect to some random device? Be glad this wasnt a rogue device.
Original commenter here. Talk about a blast from the past!
It was indeed surprising and scary for me too. Hard to recall precise details from a decade ago but I think that both the devices connected because I used the same password on them and while the reset caused the test WAP to become a repeater, it still had the credentials necessary to connect to the production WAP.
I did not have enough time or resources to find the root cause because we were still getting back up, I believe after Hurricane Charley.
Re: Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006)
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
That line pulled me up short too. What an interesting analyses of the scene. I always got the impression Linux was looked down on early on (learned about Linux very late), and there you go.
From what I have seen around the net, the (ex-)Sun people are still salty about the outcome. Keep in mind that Solaris can be traced back to the original Bell Labs UNIX.
"Keep in mind that Solaris can be traced back to the original Bell Labs UNIX."
Kind of. Solaris' history is a bit quirky due to it being built on SVR4 (which is the part that "can be traced back to the original Bell Labs UNIX"), SVR4 having in turn been based on a hodge-podge of "good parts" from all sorts of Unix implementations (including BSD - both on its own and by way of SunOS - and Xenix).
It's thanks to Solaris, though, that we have the only (AFAIK) FOSS implementation of "real" Unix in any form: OpenSolaris (which was then violently murdered by Oracle, but it lives on as illumos and the various distributions thereof, so not all is lost).
I reckon the biggest reason for the eventual outcome is that Linux was FOSS from pretty much the start and wasn't dealing with a big legal conflict (unlike BSD, which was still dealing with AT&T lawsuits and such). By the time Sun released OpenSolaris, it was by far too late for them to really curb Linux's momentum.
Re: Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006)
#46In this BeOS debugging story ("A Testing Fairy Tale"), their floppy disk stress tests can run all day but fail when run overnight. The morning sunlight through the office window triggered the test machine's floppy disk write-protection mechanism, causing a write failure during the test.
https://www.haiku-os.org/legacy-docs/benewsletter/Issue4-22....
Re: Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006)
#47Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or the email server that couldn't send emails more than 500 miles: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
Or the server that timed out when pallets in the shipping room were lifted: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/vunp/the_case_o...
[deleted]
Re: Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006)
#48Well my best-worst debugging story concerns a friend's work based email account and Microsoft Outlook (in 2012). Occasionally it would fail to connect to send email to the server, just randomly.
Obvious troubleshooting ensued, web traffic worked, could ping the email server, could connect with telnet and read email that way; Thunderbird worked. Created a new account, that would work for a while and then fail again.
Less obvious troubleshooting, traced route to server whilst running the connection - route worked, connection failed. Outlook logs showed attempts to connect to the correct URL but the connection wasn't being made. Checked for malware. Reset router, actually I think we replaced it. Pulled out a sysinternals tool, tcpview IIRC, watched the connections being made ... hang on, what's that IP address??
Turns out Windows was querying and getting the IP address but somewhere it was reversing the dotted quad and when Outlook said it was connecting to the relay.example.com server - lets say 6.7.8.9 - it was instead attempting to connect to 9.8.7.6 ...
I didn't track whether it was MS Windows or Outlook that was in error, I just dropped the correct address in as a line in the HOSTS file on the three affected computers. Fixed.
Very satisfying to find the way the problem arose and an easy fix; but would love to have seen internally where the error was arising and exactly why. I did find one other report that sounded like the same problem IIRC. My only idea was that an automated reverse-IP hostname like some ISPs use - like "9-8-7-6.ispnet.com" - was for some reason getting parsed in as the IP, but I wasn't about to start reverse engineering stuff to find out.
Re: Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006)
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or the email server that couldn't send emails more than 500 miles: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
First time hearing this story, and also just discovered `units` which I really love :)
Funny, I didn't understand what you were referring to and quickly forgot about your comment. I then read the 500-mile story, got to the end and thought "units? oh cool, new command... wait, wasn't there a comment about `units`?"
Re: Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006)
#50Wacky story, but this is very typical. They had unsecured wireless devices attached to thier network. A misconfigured device, misconfigured due to the hurricane, ended up causing internal problems. I muust ask, why was a wifi device so ready to connect to some random device? Be glad this wasnt a rogue device.
Original commenter here. Talk about a blast from the past! It was indeed surprising and scary for me too. Hard to recall precise details from a decade ago but I think that both the devices connected because I used the same password on them and while the reset caused the test WAP to become a repeater, it still had the credentials necessary to connect to the production WAP. I did not have enough time or resources to fi…
Hey, a reunion! In case you were wondering, the reason I submitted this was that it recently came up in /r/TenYearsAgoOnReddit:
https://www.reddit.com/r/TenYearsAgoOnReddit/comments/5jo2dk... (then ctrl-f "original post")