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Ask HN: What (almost) company sinking engineering mistakes have you witnessed?

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Re: Ask HN: What (almost) company sinking engineering mistakes have you witnessed?

#11

Post by mjw_byrne »

mywittyname wrote: post #6
LinuxBender wrote: post #4

To protect their identity I won't go into specifics, but not implementing anti-tampering on local and remote backups i.e. protection from root. Backups only residing on live systems. Not protecting systems from bad automation. Not deprecating old automation frameworks and continually adding new automation frameworks. I am intentionally excluding specific incidents.

> but not implementing anti-tampering on local and remote backups i.e. protection from root. How do you accomplish this? I have some ideas/assumptions, but I'd like to hear more about the best practices here.

Separate storage of file hashes would make tampering detectable. Actually preventing root modifying a file probably has to be done at the hardware level.

Re: Ask HN: What (almost) company sinking engineering mistakes have you witnessed?

#12

Post by bfung »

LinuxBender wrote: post #4

To protect their identity I won't go into specifics, but not implementing anti-tampering on local and remote backups i.e. protection from root. Backups only residing on live systems. Not protecting systems from bad automation. Not deprecating old automation frameworks and continually adding new automation frameworks. I am intentionally excluding specific incidents.

How did not doing these things sink the company?

The problems stated are bad, but did something actually happen as a result, like a rogue script deleting things and the company no longer in business?

Re: Ask HN: What (almost) company sinking engineering mistakes have you witnessed?

#14

Post by nicolaslem »

mywittyname wrote: post #6
LinuxBender wrote: post #4

To protect their identity I won't go into specifics, but not implementing anti-tampering on local and remote backups i.e. protection from root. Backups only residing on live systems. Not protecting systems from bad automation. Not deprecating old automation frameworks and continually adding new automation frameworks. I am intentionally excluding specific incidents.

> but not implementing anti-tampering on local and remote backups i.e. protection from root. How do you accomplish this? I have some ideas/assumptions, but I'd like to hear more about the best practices here.

Backups sent to a remote system should be append only so that if a machine is compromised, a malicious actor cannot delete or corrupt previous backups.

Re: Ask HN: What (almost) company sinking engineering mistakes have you witnessed?

#18

Post by alex-ant »

h2odragon wrote: post #2

Saw someone buy a lot of bumper stickers to promote a political issue, without paying sufficient attention to the printing details. The ink was not UV tolerant. Used outside, the stickers became blank white within a week. as i recall part of the slogan was "long term thinking"

That is funny xD

Re: Ask HN: What (almost) company sinking engineering mistakes have you witnessed?

#19

Post by hakunin »

Falling into the CMS trap[1] at a sensitive time in a startup can kill the business. In brief: when you try to build out too much complexity up front, everything easy becomes hard, everything hard becomes impossible, and generally any change takes too long. And since sometimes you don't have the luxury/runway to retry, you are stuck with it.

[1]: http://max.engineer/cms-trap

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