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martyb writes:
"Remember that one bug that had you tearing your hair out and banging your head against the wall for the longest time? And how it felt when you finally solved it? Here's a chance to share your greatest frustration and triumph with the community.
One that I vividly recall occurred back in the early 90's at a startup that was developing custom PBX hardware and software. There was the current development prototype rack and another rack for us in Quality Assurance (QA). Our shipping deadline for a major client was fast approaching, and the pressure level was high as development released the latest hardware and software for us to test. We soon discovered that our system would not boot up successfully. We were getting all kinds of errors; different errors each time. Development's machine booted just fine, *every* time. We swapped out our hard disks, the power supply, the main processing board, the communications boards, and finally the entire backplane in which all of these were housed. The days passed and the system still failed to boot up successfully and gave us different errors on each reboot.
What could it be? We were all stymied and frustrated as the deadline loomed before us. It was then that I noticed the power strips on each rack into which all the frames and power supplies were plugged. The power strip on the dev server was 12-gauge (i.e. could handle 20 amps) but the one on the QA rack was only 14-gauge (15 amps). The power draw caused by spinning up the drives was just enough to leave the system board under-powered for bootup.
We swapped in a new $10 power strip and it worked perfectly. And we made the deadline, too!
So, fellow Soylents, what have you got? Share your favorite tale of woe and success and finally bask in the glory you deserve."
(Score: 3, Informative) by FuckBeta on Saturday March 08 2014, @05:04PM
From: Trey Harris
Here's a problem that *sounded* impossible... I almost regret posting :-) The story is slightly altered in order to protect
the story to a wide audience, because it makes a great tale over drinks
at a conference.
the guilty, elide over irrelevant and boring details, and generally make
the whole thing more entertaining.
I was working in a job running the campus email system some years ago
when I got a call from the chairman of the statistics department.
"We're having a problem sending email out of the department."
"What's the problem?" I asked.
"We can't send mail more than 500 miles," the chairman explained.
I choked on my latte. "Come again?"
"We can't send mail farther than 500 miles from here," he repeated. "A
little bit more, actually. Call it 520 miles. But no farther."
"Um... Email really doesn't work that way, generally," I said, trying
to keep panic out of my voice. One doesn't display panic when speaking
to a department chairman, even of a relatively impoverished department
like statistics. "What makes you think you can't send mail more than
500 miles?"
"It's not what I *think*," the chairman replied testily. "You see, when
we first noticed this happening, a few days ago--"
"You waited a few DAYS?" I interrupted, a tremor tinging my voice. "And
you couldn't send email this whole time?"
"We could send email. Just not more than--"
"--500 miles, yes," I finished for him, "I got that. But why didn't
you call earlier?"
"Well, we hadn't collected enough data to be sure of what was going on
until just now." Right. This is the chairman of *statistics*. "Anyway,
I asked one of the geostatisticians to look into it--"
"Geostatisticians..."
"--yes, and she's produced a map showing the radius within which we can
send email to be slightly more than 500 miles. There are a number of
destinations within that radius that we can't reach, either, or reach
sporadically, but we can never email farther than this radius."
"I see," I said, and put my head in my hands. "When did this start?
A few days ago, you said, but did anything change in your systems at
that time?"
"Well, the consultant came in and patched our server and rebooted it.
But I called him, and he said he didn't touch the mail system."
"Okay, let me take a look, and I'll call you back," I said, scarcely
believing that I was playing along. It wasn't April Fool's Day. I
tried to remember if someone owed me a practical joke.
I logged into their department's server, and sent a few test mails.
This was in the Research Triangle of North Carolina, and a test mail to
my own account was delivered without a hitch. Ditto for one sent to
Richmond, and Atlanta, and Washington. Another to Princeton (400 miles)
worked.
But then I tried to send an email to Memphis (600 miles). It failed.
Boston, failed. Detroit, failed. I got out my address book and started
trying to narrow this down. New York (420 miles) worked, but Providence
(580 miles) failed.
I was beginning to wonder if I had lost my sanity. I tried emailing a
friend who lived in North Carolina, but whose ISP was in Seattle.
Thankfully, it failed. If the problem had had to do with the geography
of the human recipient and not his mail server, I think I would have
broken down in tears.
Having established that -- unbelievably -- the problem as reported was
true, and repeatable, I took a look at the sendmail.cf file. It looked
fairly normal. In fact, it looked familiar.
I diffed it against the sendmail.cf in my home directory. It hadn't been
altered -- it was a sendmail.cf I had written. And I was fairly certain
I hadn't enabled the "FAIL_MAIL_OVER_500_MILES" option. At a loss, I
telnetted into the SMTP port. The server happily responded with a SunOS
sendmail banner.
Wait a minute... a SunOS sendmail banner? At the time, Sun was still
shipping Sendmail 5 with its operating system, even though Sendmail 8 was
fairly mature. Being a good system administrator, I had standardized on
Sendmail 8. And also being a good system administrator, I had written a
sendmail.cf that used the nice long self-documenting option and variable
names available in Sendmail 8 rather than the cryptic punctuation-mark
codes that had been used in Sendmail 5.
The pieces fell into place, all at once, and I again choked on the dregs
of my now-cold latte. When the consultant had "patched the server," he
had apparently upgraded the version of SunOS, and in so doing
*downgraded* Sendmail. The upgrade helpfully left the sendmail.cf
alone, even though it was now the wrong version.
It so happens that Sendmail 5 -- at least, the version that Sun shipped,
which had some tweaks -- could deal with the Sendmail 8 sendmail.cf, as
most of the rules had at that point remained unaltered. But the new
long configuration options -- those it saw as junk, and skipped. And
the sendmail binary had no defaults compiled in for most of these, so,
finding no suitable settings in the sendmail.cf file, they were set to
zero.
One of the settings that was set to zero was the timeout to connect to
the remote SMTP server. Some experimentation established that on this
particular machine with its typical load, a zero timeout would abort a
connect call in slightly over three milliseconds.
An odd feature of our campus network at the time was that it was 100%
switched. An outgoing packet wouldn't incur a router delay until hitting
the POP and reaching a router on the far side. So time to connect to a
lightly-loaded remote host on a nearby network would actually largely be
governed by the speed of light distance to the destination rather than by
incidental router delays.
Feeling slightly giddy, I typed into my shell:
$ units
1311 units, 63 prefixes
You have: 3 millilightseconds
You want: miles
* 558.84719
/ 0.0017893979
"500 miles, or a little bit more."
Trey Harris
--
I'm looking for work. If you need a SAGE Level IV with 10 years Perl,
tool development, training, and architecture experience, please email
me at trey@sage.org. I'm willing to relocate for the right opportunity.
--
http://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles [mit.edu]
Quit Slashdot...because Fuck Beta!