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Ask HN: Ever worked with a service that can never be restarted?

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Re: Ask HN: Ever worked with a service that can never be restarted?

#181

Post by dang »

celticmusic wrote: post #103
hoorayimhelping wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Sorry that nobody else got it, but I like that joke. No, plenty of us got it. It's just not funny right now. A person is trying to find a real solution to a real problem they have. Every comment in this thread represents a potential hope that someone knows how to fix it. When someone comes in to a serious thread that is spitballing ideas and tries to make it about them by cracking jokes and being fun and clever, it…

what a silly excuse for being offended by nothing. Watch as I come up with a random reason you're wrong. The OP could see it and laugh and that could possibly lighten their day and help them relax. Wait, no. That's positive, online we're only supposed to bash men, hitler, and take everything in the most negative light possible. I should have instead judged you as a hateful person who has a horrible life and no friend…

Please don't take HN threads further into flamewar. It helps nothing.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Ask HN: Ever worked with a service that can never be restarted?

#182

Post by nnq »

_jal wrote: post #98
nnq wrote: post #92

Unpopular advice: find a subtle way to make it crash, preferably stealthy, but if not possible, at least in a way that can be attributable to mild innocent incompetence instead of malice! Then there will be more and more interesting work to do for you and others, either rediscovering and properly documenting the config, or, hopefully, architecting and coding its replacement! In the aftermath, the organization will be…

Back when I ran a company, my partners and I gamed out what to do with employees in various situations, as a way of coming to a consensus. I was against legal action in all but extreme hypotheticals. Behavior like this is in that class. You assume you not only have all the relevant information to predict the outcome, but also that your analysis of the situation is superior enough to trump those who actually own the p…

> Thinking about the fact that people like this are out there makes me paranoid about my hiring all over again.

To be honest, I was 100% trolling or troll-baiting "for the lulz" - I wouldn't actually ever apply my "advice". And I don't think there's actually a significant chance of coming across people thinking this way in your business unless you work in very specific areas.

I mean, sure, some of us enjoy to destroy/break things or to make them fail or fall apart for either "the fun of it" or "to leave space for future better things", but we do it in "special controlled environments" to get our kicks, not in our business/work. Unless you're in the military or a similar business you wouldn't ever be in the position or hiring people expected to manifest their selective-destructive tendencies at work and have the risk of them also occasionally turning the gun in the wrong direction.

The biggest problem for a business imo is people who actually do this but do it subtly and unconsciously: like the developers picking "interesting" architectures and technologies that end up destroying the possibility of integration with legacy services and indirectly forces an expensive rewrite of those legacy systems, the managers that adopt "novel" management systems that end up pushing valuable people out of the company etc.

People that are consciously doing sabbotage and destructive action (even if it's "to make the world a better place" in their views) are easy to spot and handle (eg. legally), and those with the competence to really do things stealthly are always more motivated to apply such skills in other areas... the other "damaged apples" doing it without fully realizing are dangerous for businesses and you need to worry about them when hiring...

Re: Ask HN: Ever worked with a service that can never be restarted?

#183

Post by james_s_tayler »

beat wrote: post #142

"The physical config was accidentally overwritten and there are no backups". Welcome to legacy. So for a situation like this, there are several things that you need to think about. First and foremost... what is the impact when (not if) this process finally stops? This isn't just for technical people. You need a business impact assessment. You need the users involved. They're your lever for fighting the inevitable fea…

>"The physical config was accidentally overwritten and there are no backups".

>Welcome to legacy.

No. Not welcome to legacy. Welcome to a terrible company with terrible processes.

Re: Ask HN: Ever worked with a service that can never be restarted?

#186

Post by eru »

listenallyall wrote: post #34
gberger wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not sure that 55 months of up-time indicates it's more or less likely to go down in the next month, but I'd guess more likely. If 'going down' is an event governed by chance (e.g. power failure), then it does not matter if it has been up for 55 months or 55 minutes. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gambler%27s_fallacy

Gambler's Fallacy is applicable "when it has otherwise been established that the probability of such events does not depend on what has happened in the past" -- not the case here. The fact that the server has been running uninterrupted for 55 months is a strong clue that the power to this system is robust, not subject to "random" power loss scenarios like one would expect at a typical residence.

> The fact that the server has been running uninterrupted for 55 months is a strong clue that the power to this system is robust, not subject to "random" power loss scenarios like one would expect at a typical residence.

I don't remember random power losses in typical first world residences after perhaps the 1990s?

Re: Ask HN: Ever worked with a service that can never be restarted?

#187

Post by mod »

eru wrote: post #186
listenallyall wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Gambler's Fallacy is applicable "when it has otherwise been established that the probability of such events does not depend on what has happened in the past" -- not the case here. The fact that the server has been running uninterrupted for 55 months is a strong clue that the power to this system is robust, not subject to "random" power loss scenarios like one would expect at a typical residence.

> The fact that the server has been running uninterrupted for 55 months is a strong clue that the power to this system is robust, not subject to "random" power loss scenarios like one would expect at a typical residence. I don't remember random power losses in typical first world residences after perhaps the 1990s?

I get them at my house. Every time there's an ice storm. And for a while there was an intermittent issue where floodwaters came up over my internet port in the junction box, and so my internet would go out for a while. Hopefully the power grid isn't as janky.

Re: Ask HN: Ever worked with a service that can never be restarted?

#188

Post by eru »

mod wrote: post #187
eru wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The fact that the server has been running uninterrupted for 55 months is a strong clue that the power to this system is robust, not subject to "random" power loss scenarios like one would expect at a typical residence. I don't remember random power losses in typical first world residences after perhaps the 1990s?

I get them at my house. Every time there's an ice storm. And for a while there was an intermittent issue where floodwaters came up over my internet port in the junction box, and so my internet would go out for a while. Hopefully the power grid isn't as janky.

Interesting! I guess I never lived either in rural areas or anywhere with ice storms.

Re: Ask HN: Ever worked with a service that can never be restarted?

#189

Post by Piskvorrr »

adrianpike wrote: post #145
Piskvorrr wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you barge in, lawyers blazing, shouting about "stolen intellectual property", the likely response is "don't have any, never had", regardless of its veracity. OTOH, "disks that are left unerased by accident" _and_ generally being very open on the nature of the emergency is much more likely to bring help.

This case is one I'd be pretty careful about though as a former employee - the situation the company's found themselves in is pretty indicative of mismanagement, and desperate people do desperate things. IANAL, but a hold harmless agreement would be a simple CYA that I'd do if I was personally in this situation.

Indeed. That's why I wrote, in essence "if you start with 'you surely HAVE our code, GIMME!!!!!'", the answer will always be 'nope', regardless of facts".

Re: Ask HN: Ever worked with a service that can never be restarted?

#190

Post by FDSGSG »

jacquesm wrote: post #84

If it is running you can still get at the binary file through /proc and recover it. The file system will only really delete a file when there are no more users and a running process counts as the file being in used (so that pages can be paged back in from it if needed).

> but the physical config was accidentally overwritten

Overwritten, not deleted. Open file handles can't really help you there.

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