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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?

#161

Post by burlesona »

As a consultant I got a job from a major public company to fix a new touchscreen based in-car dashboard they had built. It was a web app running on a cheap android tablet full screen. The thing worked well, they said, except that it would get stuck in demo mode, and you couldn’t switch out of it. They’d paid an overseas contractor a significant sum to build this and eventually fired them when they got stuck at this point.

Upon opening the code I discovered the entire program was a carefully constructed slide show with hundreds of jpgs in a jQuery carousel and some magic click areas coded in to jump the user between slides. Other than this code to jump to specific slides, there was no code at all. Even the text on screen was in the images.

I should note that their git repo consisted of about a hundred folders whose names were dates, and one folder named “current.” That was actually my first warning of just what I was getting in to.

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

#162

Post by ashleyn »

chrissnell wrote: post #52

In 1997, I worked with FedEx to build an integrated order management system for the e-commerce company that I ran with my dad. Orders would come into my Perl-based order management system and the pickers would use the web interface to print a packing slip. A bash script would generate a Postscript barcode and then my Perl would generate a packing slip in LaTeX that included that barcode. The LaTeX-generated PS file w…

I could hear the Looney Tunes factory music in my head just reading this.

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

#164

Post by ocdtrekkie »

The one I removed a ways back that really irked me was a poor man's backup circuit: Equipment room had two electrical circuits. A consumer grade desk UPS was plugged into one, and a homemade male to male power cord went from the output of the UPS to a wall outlet for the other circuit. So if the power went out, the UPS started feeding power into the other circuit.

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

#165

Post by odammit »

Synroc wrote: post #160
etxm wrote: post #144

I worked for a chain of medical clinics in the early 2000s in Florida. Everything was going digital. We had a “remote” office across the street that didn’t have internet access and it was really expensive to have lines installed. I don’t remember what the device was called but it was some sort of satellite dish. Our network admin had ordered them and installed them on the roof tops of both buildings and we could prov…

So if I understand correctly, the semi was tall enough that it would interrupt the signal between the two dishes on the roof?

Yeah the other building was a small one story office that was a at a lower elevation. The main building was a converted strip mall so it had a bit more height with the extra space from the drop ceilings.

We ended up putting the dishes on longer poles. :)

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

#166

Post by davidmr »

This isn’t even top 20 in this thread, but here’s mine: maybe 17 years ago, we upgraded our department server from a big old Sun 4/690 running sunos to a shiny new Ultra80 running Solaris.

Among the many functions this server has was to host a bunch of black and white x terminals. Probably only a few people here ever used those (although more than most other online forums!), but basically the idea is that they plug into the network, at power on they tftp down the image for the x server, they boot and allow you to run x client apps on the server, an 80s thin client implementation. So we upgrade the server and things are working pretty well, especially for such a major upgrade.

My boss/mentor at the time is truly brilliant, so we really had most everything thought of. The only thing that was off was that all of a sudden the xterms all stopped booting. We couldn't figure it out. Network sniffers didn't show anything useful--we were just baffled.

On a whim, we decided to take the tftp server out of inetd control and truss it (Solaris equivalent of strace). The first time? Worked perfectly--our test xterm booted just fine. Eventually we figured out that the new server was so fast that the speed of the tftp transfer was triggering a problem on the Ethernet card firmware of the xterms and by using truss, it slowed down the transfer and bypassed the bug.

Solution: In inetd.conf, we just spawned in.tftpd with "truss -o /dev/null". Never saw the issue again.

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

#167

Post by theyinwhy »

etxm wrote: post #144

I worked for a chain of medical clinics in the early 2000s in Florida. Everything was going digital. We had a “remote” office across the street that didn’t have internet access and it was really expensive to have lines installed. I don’t remember what the device was called but it was some sort of satellite dish. Our network admin had ordered them and installed them on the roof tops of both buildings and we could prov…

Ah, good old laser link. We had one of those. Great connection as long as there was any. Came to an end as developers startet a revolution. We went home and stated to only come back when there was a proper connection. By the end of the week the company gave in and one month later we had fibre. Those were the days :D.

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

#168

Post by hhmc »

etxm wrote: post #144

I worked for a chain of medical clinics in the early 2000s in Florida. Everything was going digital. We had a “remote” office across the street that didn’t have internet access and it was really expensive to have lines installed. I don’t remember what the device was called but it was some sort of satellite dish. Our network admin had ordered them and installed them on the roof tops of both buildings and we could prov…

So what was the fix? Boosting the height?

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

#169

Post by time0ut »

nikisweeting wrote: post #127
time0ut wrote: post #96

An external vendor delivered a new static marketing site written in PHP. Info sec team wouldn't let us install mod_php on the publicly facing servers and the vendor needed more time/money than the budget and timeline allowed to change it. A coworker stood up a local server and wrote a script to periodically crawl it and push changes out to the publicly facing apache servers. It might still be there for all I know.

Thats actually not so bad imo, it's fairly common to build a site in wordpress just for the CMS, then convert it to static HTML periodically and rehost it straight from CDN edge servers.

Definitely not as crazy as some of the other posts here, but it felt like a hacky work around for something that probably wasn't really a problem.

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

#170

Post by theyinwhy »

dijit wrote: post #159
etxm wrote: post #144

I worked for a chain of medical clinics in the early 2000s in Florida. Everything was going digital. We had a “remote” office across the street that didn’t have internet access and it was really expensive to have lines installed. I don’t remember what the device was called but it was some sort of satellite dish. Our network admin had ordered them and installed them on the roof tops of both buildings and we could prov…

Sounds like a point-to-point directional wifi radio. They're far from a hack and have been used to great success upwards of 2miles away from each other with 1Gbps throughput, even for small ISPs.

Well, it was in the early 2000s so I doubt wireless would have given any reasonable bandwidth. Sounds more like https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free-space_optical_communica... at least that's what we had those days.
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