A Google Cloud support engineer solves a tough DNS case

Post by maccam94 » Wed, May 20, 2020, 8:45 PM UTC

pbhjpbhj wrote: post #52

Seems like a good place to mention this: I once was troubleshooting an Outlook issue where email stopped working after some time, seemingly at random. Turned out that Outlook picked up the IP address for the mail server backwards - so instead of WW.XX.YY.ZZ Outlook tried ZZ.YY.XX.WW. Found that by using sysinternals network tools, confirmed with Wireshark. Thunderbird worked, ping to the domain name (of the mail serv…

Post by jiveturkey » Wed, May 20, 2020, 9:02 PM UTC

HugoDaniel wrote: post #245

That is why google only hires the best

Post by mooman219 » Wed, May 20, 2020, 9:04 PM UTC

techntoke wrote: post #252

storyinmemo wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My fleet of machines I was the owner of at Facebook was around 10,000. I still remember the odd JVM crash that prompted me to reimage a machine. I wouldn't have remembered it except there were a few that month and it was the 3rd time I reimaged the same machine that I thought, "That's odd... I think I know that machine name." Checked history, saw the 3 repair jobs I had submitted... RAM was reset, CPU was eventually…

> Cattle is a threshold, but when the same problem keeps coming up it's time to call the vet. If CPU was bad, then that means that you kept running the instance on the same node. Quick was to test if it was "cattle" would have been to try on a different node Additionally, if CPU was bad how was it not affecting other services?

Post by qmarchi » Thu, May 21, 2020, 12:15 AM UTC

amessina1 wrote: post #231

programmertote wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm inspired by how much you seem to know about the details of computer network stuff. Is that a required knowledge to become a Google Tech Support person or you are just above average in terms of that among your peers? Also, I wonder how you learn all these knowledge (that is, asking for recommendation on a few books/resources for learning) if you don't mind sharing. Thanks in advance!

I don't have deep knowledge of details of compute networks, there is a team of TSE who deal with network cases who know more than me. But the whole point of troubleshooting is not knowing what is wrong, but being able to find what is wrong. In order to do that you need good basis, and those you can make by studying how networks and linux systems work (someone here posted some titles) and with experience (I have some…

Post by atombender » Thu, May 21, 2020, 2:05 AM UTC

bostik wrote: post #234

atombender wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Puppet can be difficult to get right. Dependencies are _very_ hard to get right, despite the fact that Puppet is virtually designed around the idea of dependencies. I'm a fan of the concept, less a fan of the execution. Unfortunately, the competition (Salt, Ansible, Chef) aren't really any better here. These days, I run Kubernetes whenever possible, and keep the base OS light, which makes the configuration management…

After years of pain, I've come to appreciate what was once relayed to me. All configuration management software is broken. They are equally terrible, each in their own merry way. The only thing you get to do is to choose the one that sucks the least for your use-case , and two years down the line hope that you made the right choice. Which is why I have come to believe that the very concept of host configuration manag…