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Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

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Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

#2

Post by orf »

Finance needed to do end-of-year stuff a couple of days past end-of-year. The system couldn't handle this, bad things would happen and data would change once end-of-year passes.

Solution? A bash script that does:

   while true:
       set date to 4pm end-of-year
       sleep 1

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

#3

Post by astockwell »

Right after WinXP came out, I was a sys/win admin at a manufacturing co. Their ERP system was an old VB app that sat on a share drive and everyone opened the same .exe from their respective workstations.

The app required a ton of scheduled database and ERP tasks (it used a legacy flat-file db), so the vendor wrapped them all up in a secondary executable that was effectively a non-headless (headful?) daemon (this was expensive, niche industry software btw). The first instance of the application that opened would also trigger the daemon to open too, on whichever PC it was executed on (it was supposed to be opened on the server 1st). It was provided by the vendor this way, as part of the COTS application.

As a result of this daemon hack, every couple days (after the application crashed on the server, as it did frequently) I would run around the building to dozens and dozens of workstations until I found the user’s workstation that had been the first to run the ERP after the server process crashed, and thus had the daemon running on their workstation. Then I would kill it, and sprint back to the server closet to reopen the daemon before any other users would run the ERP and grab the daemon (later would just RDP after we got off NT).

It was awesome.

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

#4

Post by twodave »

The entire billing system at my first job was written as a console exe by a (brilliant) guy in during one-day session, working almost completely from live debugging breakpoints (against the production database). The result was less than beautiful, but there were rarely any problems with it. Needless to say anytime a billing inquiry came up it was his problem (which he was okay with since he owned the place).

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

#7

Post by jboggan »

Using the Google Sheets API to store session history and metadata for a nightly backfill job instead of, you know, a database. The program broke after the creator left and no one could figure out how to bring it back up. The engineer assigned to fix it pulled their hair out looking for the database creds, local SQLite3 records, anything that would initialize the backfill. Finally realized it wasn't just printing out metadata to a Google Sheet but actually relying on that as a persistence layer. Root cause of the breakage was automatically adding every Hadoop counter from the job as its own column in the Sheet, which eventually exceeded the dimension limits.

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

#8

Post by Spooky23 »

I worked at a place that had a large, distributed terminal network running on something like OSF or DEC Unix.

It was 2001 and the thing was on life support while PCs were being rolled out. I was helping to rack my new database servers, which was next to this big lab table/shelf combo with like 16 terminals on it. When pulling a cable I banged my head on the table, then this big book fell on my hand.

About 10 minutes later, a bunch of graybeards come around the corner yelling “WTF are you doing!”

Turns out that the dictionary that hit my hand was perched across two keyboards, holding down the “enter” keys of two terminals. Turns out that for reasons unknown, those terminals had to be repeatedly hitting the enter key in order for the logins and print jobs of about 40,000 people to work.

Re: Ask HN: Weirdest hack that you ever saw in production?

#10

Post by crispinb »

Webhost circa 2002. Lots of carrots from Microsoft for us to go big on ASP.NET hosting. Fat boss made a deal which involved us rewriting our customer interface in ASP.NET from the existing ColdFusion morass. His eyes popping at our estimates of how long this would take, he came up with a solution: rename our *.cfm files to .aspx, and map IIS to pass .aspx files to the CF server. Job done.
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