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Source-diving as a system administrator
- jolan 16y agoGreat article. Even with these tips in mind, it's not always easy. I've seen: - environment variables changing the behavior of the program - load-dependent pthreads issues (can't reproduce on unloaded dev machine) - shell scripts silently failing to do important things (liking kill off the old processes; but there's a check to not spawn if it's already running) - config files that looked fine (realize that there's a case sensitivity issue in 1 out of 5 of the config files)
- nuxi 16y ago> - environment variables changing the behavior of the program But have you seen them abused as "additional" parameters to a function? putenv() by the caller, getenv() by the callee, rejoice!
- joe_the_user 16y agoIt's important to keep in mind that monkey patching a given application is not only never easy but also never a good long term solution to a given bug - unless you like the open source application so much you'd to become one of its maintainers. The simplest patches also the best. Fixing a single configuration option that is just not provided is the simplest and best monkey patch. Dealing with any logic will get scary over time.
- kunley 16y agoExcellent article. The ksplice fellows are extraordinary hackers w/ good practice!
- woodall 16y agoI saw that "0 reboots" and had to go check them out. Wouldn't you know, it's free for Ubuntu Destop! - http://www.ksplice.com/pricing http://www.ksplice.com/pricing
- niels_olson 16y agoGreat stuff. More like this, please.
- wallflower 16y agoThis other ksplice article was fascinating in how it went from command line to object code to memory addresses. http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1458147 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1458147