Post funny things about programming here! (Or just rant about your favourite programming language.)
"There was an emergency and power was temporarily cut to the card reader terminals, and now none of them work. We need to get to the server room to reboot the access control server, but it's behind a card-only door."
"How much do we want to get in?"
"Very much."
"Stand back."
And that's how I ended up busting down the server room's door.
Never put a locked door in the way of the fire brigade by the way, they will get in.
Did someone email us about a fire?
FIRE! FIRE! HELP ME!
hope this gets to you soon! best wishes, Maurice Moss
The door doesn't lock anymore, so we've got that covered.
Just don't end up busting into the servers haha!
I'm currently working with a client that doesn't have a health endpoint or any kind of monitoring on their new API . They say monitoring isn't needed because it will never go down.
Naturally it went down on day two. They still haven't added any "unnecessary" monitoring, insisting that it will never go down.
If you never know when it goes down to you it never goes down
Think smarter, not harder
Schrödinger's status
This kind of hubris may be an opportunity for contractual fuckery...
I never wrote an api that had a health system. Could you help me understand why that matters and how that helps ?
Just have an endpoint in your API (like /health) that doesn’t do anything but return “ok”.
So if your database goes down, your filesystem is full, etc, that endpoint will always return “ok” with HTTP 200. That way you can setup a ping monitoring service that will trigger an alarm if the process itself is down.
You of course need more pinging for the database server etc. But at least you know which service is down instead of “the whole website is down and we don’t know which parts”.
Health checks are the only reason I've used 204 no content responses, so there's that too.
That's because you don't write bugs. Health check are only needed when you're planning on having bugs in your system. Instead of doing monitoring I prefer to spend a bit more time fixing all the bugs and then my systems never break so no monitoring is needed. Of course the downside is lack of job security. They can fire me and the system will just continue running forever, no support needed. If you add some bugs they cannot fire you because someone needs to keep fixing the broken system.
Source (with alt-text on site): https://xkcd.com/705/
How do I keep forgetting to do this? I just need to set a reminder, thank you for reminding me! I'll add this to the body of the post
You can also set it as the URL parameter.
Well then it would link to the webpage, not the actual image right?
Randall also had a followup t-shirt, now out of production:
I didn't know about that!
Thanks every couple of months I see an xkcd and think haven't read that in a while, then I get to go catch up. Today was a good day
Haha! Same!
People argue about repost bots. I'm happy when I see a comic I haven't thought about in years get upvotes and more people discover it.
after several years it's fine, but not two days after the initial post
I do the exact same thing
That's why you have failover; you never have to fight terrorists to keep your contractual uptime agreements!
tf2 engineer was just a sysadmin trying to create a good failover
Haha lol
