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This story is slightly munged due to my own faulty memory and to obfuscate the guilty parties... The company I work for develops network appliances for large b
by bityard 6y ago
This story is slightly munged due to my own faulty memory and to obfuscate the guilty parties...
The company I work for develops network appliances for large backbone and provider networks. One of the things these appliances do is maintain a "hearbeat" with each other so that if one disappears, the others know about it and can send an alert to the NOC.
The heartbeat packets themselves needed some kind of payload, even though the payload was not important. At that time, the company was still a small and scrappy startup so humor was generally encouraged. So naturally the engineer decided the payload should be a random line from a list of pirate quotes. Ship-its all around and the feature made it into the next major product release.
A couple months later, a very angry call comes into the helpdesk from someone _very_ high up in the food chain of a major U.S. telecom. It turns out they had noticed the pirate quotes in a random packet dump they were looking at and the network team spent a whole weekend thinking their network was very deeply compromised because our appliances were one of the tools they were using to inspect the network and kept seeing the "Yarr, Matey!" and such everywhere they looked.
Needless to say, the pirate quotes went away in a few days as part of an emergency patch and the heartbeat message was changed to something more mundane but less likely to trigger heart attacks in our customers.
- geoah 6y agoAmazing story, thanks for sharing it. Any chance the pirate quotes got replaces with a random poem on the internet in this story? :D
- whalesalad 6y ago> Needless to say, the pirate quotes went away in a few days as part of an emergency patch and the heartbeat message was changed to something more mundane but less likely to trigger heart attacks in our customers. It's like the engineer picked the literal worst possible thing to send over the wire. Like making an alarm clock for people who have wartime PTSD that fires off a 9mm round to wake you up. More startups need to be cognizant of this. Humor is important but there is a balance between fun and idiotic.
- Cerium 6y agoAt work we have a test for these things: "If you would be uncomfortable explaining something to an auditor or judge, don't include it in the product." I think it is a good test because there are many in-jokes and engineering terms that don't sound good to laypeople.
- mikepurvis 6y agoSee also: any time a "subversion repo" is discussed in the mainstream media (see for example the breathless coverage of how Levandowski used one to steal the chauffeur project files from Google).
- timthorn 6y agoA "git repo" isn't completely neutral either, at least in the UK.
- rictic 6y agoSomething I found myself saying recently: "When the parent process is about to die it's tries to kill its children, otherwise the orphans stick around holding onto their ports which is super annoying."
- scollet 6y agoQuestionable search you may have to explain to your family includes: "How to kill child of parent with fork"
- formerly_proven 6y agohow to kill zombie - kill their parents. repeat until no more parents are left.
- qubex 6y agoIf you had omitted the word ‘process’ you would have achieved the height of perfection.