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Joyent us-east-1 rebooted due to operator error

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Re: Joyent us-east-1 rebooted due to operator error

#61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My thoughts exactly. Poor fella. I've seen worse though. A newish officer spilled his morning coffee into the circuitry of a device worth over 10 zeros. Immediately short circuited.

really? what can cost that much ?

... And be utterly destroyed by a single cup of coffee?

Re: Joyent us-east-1 rebooted due to operator error

#62
post #29
post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are keysharing protocols; you can do something like 5 sysadmins have a split of the master key such that any 3 of them can access the master account.

For day-to-day maintenance of systems, that's crippling. If I need 2 cosigns to run "date" across the fleet while I'm troubleshooting an NTP issue, and then 2 cosigns again to run "service ntpd status", and so forth, my coworkers will have lit my desk on fire long before I fix the clocks. There are definitely use cases for keysharing systems like you describe: if we're talking about getting access to a database with…

"date" and service status don't typically require root.

Re: Joyent us-east-1 rebooted due to operator error

#63
post #50
post #2

Joyent's messaging about "we're cloud, but with perfect uptime" was always broken. It's mildly gross that the current messaging sounds like they're throwing a sysadmin under the bus. If fat fingers can down a data center, that's an engineering problem. I care about an object store that never loses data and an API that always has an answer for me, even if it's saying things that I don't want to hear. 99.999 sounds stu…

Sure blame on the engineers. You give power, people use it badly blame the engineer for giving too much power. You don't give enough power sysadmins/users bitch and yell why don't we have enough power, we're not children. Its always the engineer fault. :(

Systems engineers, software engineers, architects, whatever. We're all in the same gang.

My point is that the problem in this case is likely the system's design, not one engineer's typing abilities.

Re: Joyent us-east-1 rebooted due to operator error

#64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our internal culture is such that everyone on the team would rather be blamed for something than accuse someone else of doing it. That's shitty, and not something you do to someone. You fix the problem and then you move on. If it makes you happy, blame me - I don't mind.

BTW, this is the right way to do it. :)

"elijahwright" shall henceforth be used in place of "scapegoat"

Re: Joyent us-east-1 rebooted due to operator error

#65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel bad for the person who made the mistake. Even though its obviously a systemic problem, and highly unlikely to be an act of negligence, Im sure he/she doesnt feel too hot right now.

My thoughts exactly. Poor fella. I've seen worse though. A newish officer spilled his morning coffee into the circuitry of a device worth over 10 zeros. Immediately short circuited.

supposedly 0.0000000001 billions of $

shit happens, design for the worst.

Re: Joyent us-east-1 rebooted due to operator error

#66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel bad for the person who made the mistake. Even though its obviously a systemic problem, and highly unlikely to be an act of negligence, Im sure he/she doesnt feel too hot right now.

It's operations. You fuck up, you suck it up, you fix it, then (and this is the important part) you prevent it from ever happening again. Feeling like shit for bringing something down is a good way to give yourself depression, given how often you will screw the pooch with root. In the same vein, anybody who says they'd fire the operator without any qualification on that remark should be given a wide berth. People ten…

Back in the day we used to say there are 2 types of network engineers, those that have dropped a backbone and those that will drop a backbone.

Re: Joyent us-east-1 rebooted due to operator error

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel bad for the person who made the mistake. Even though its obviously a systemic problem, and highly unlikely to be an act of negligence, Im sure he/she doesnt feel too hot right now.

My thoughts exactly. Poor fella. I've seen worse though. A newish officer spilled his morning coffee into the circuitry of a device worth over 10 zeros. Immediately short circuited.

How many non-zero integers were in the price of the device, though? My computer is also worth more than 10 zeros.

Re: Joyent us-east-1 rebooted due to operator error

#68
The 'devops' automation I made at my last company (and am building at my current company) had monitoring fully integrated into the system automation.

That is, 'write' style automation changes (as opposed to most 'remediation' style changes) would only proceed, on a box by box basis, if the affected cluster didn't have any critical alerts coming in.

So, if I issued a parallel, rolling 'shutdown the system' command to all boxes, it would only take down a portion of all of the boxes before automatically aborting because of critical monitoring alerts.

Parallel was calculated based on historical but manually approved load levels for each cluster, compared to current load levels. So parallel runs faster if there's very low load on a cluster, or very slowly if there's a high load on a cluster.

One way or another, most automation should automatically stop 'doing things' if there's critical alerts coming in. Or, put another way, most automation should not be able to move forward unless it can verify that it has current alert data, and that none of that data indicates critical problems.

Re: Joyent us-east-1 rebooted due to operator error

#70
post #2

Joyent's messaging about "we're cloud, but with perfect uptime" was always broken. It's mildly gross that the current messaging sounds like they're throwing a sysadmin under the bus. If fat fingers can down a data center, that's an engineering problem. I care about an object store that never loses data and an API that always has an answer for me, even if it's saying things that I don't want to hear. 99.999 sounds stu…

Joyent's marketing is not the most transparent. They haven't updated AWS prices in their pricing page since AWS lowered their prices two months ago.
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