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This seems to be about some odd certificate issue, not the network, which caused Microsoft to take access to its service management system down. From the artic
by powertower 15y ago
This seems to be about some odd certificate issue, not the network, which caused Microsoft to take access to its service management system down.
From the article itself:
> It later added that less than 3.8 per cent of hosted services had been affected.
If this was about Google or Apple, this submit would already have been flagged, taken off the front page, and several accounts would have been hell-banned.
</endjoke, but it's really true>
It will be interesting to see if Microsoft expands on this issue and if we can learn something about it... Perhaps other datacenters are also vulnerable to cert issues in their management systems.
- stickfigure 15y agoCompare this to administering machines yourself: Your "admin console" goes down every night for 8 hours while your sysadmin is asleep.
- ithkuil 15y agoIt's not unusual for my sysadmin to be waken up in the middle of the night
- stickfigure 15y agoLucky him. (or her)
- danielsoneg 15y agoIn my rather limited experience as a sysadmin, I've found avoiding those calls to be one of my best motivators: My systems work like they're supposed to because I like my sleep. Consider it a performance-based bonus.
- ww520 15y agoCan you elaborate what is the cert issue that causing the service down? It's always good to learn from temporary failure.
- powertower 15y agoToday, February 29th, is a "leap day" which happens every 4 years in a "leap year"... Otherwise, the last day of February is the 28th, and today would normally be March 1st. I'm assuming that when the day rolled over, it caused an issue with an internal system at Microsoft, that had something to do with certificate dates and/or timestamps. It's not just Microsoft that it's happening to, today I could not automatically renew any domains at Namecheap that expire tomorrow because the registry could not produce the correct expire-at date. Leap days cause odd issues.
- DrJokepu 15y agoHow the hell is that possible? Every platform out there has high quality date libraries. It's a cliché that date & time operations are very complicated (leap years, leap seconds, time zones, daylight saving time and so on), every even marginally competent developer knows instinctly to stay away from writing their own date & time code and trust a library instead to do the heavy lifting. In addition, every tester should know that when dates are involved, they should try Feb 29th and see if it breaks anything. How can bugs like this slip through?
- crcastle 15y agoAlso whether or not a year is a leap year is easy to calculate: Year divisible by 4? => leap year; year also divisible by 100? => not a leap year unless year also divisible by 400
- drivebyacct2 15y ago></endjoke, but it's really true> Seriously? Alarmist flamebait headlines about Google and Apple stuff gets posted near daily.
- ChuckMcM 15y ago"We have identified the root cause of this incident. It has been traced back to a cert issue triggered on 2/29/2012 GMT," the software giant said. So here is a quiz for you, does you software know that this is a leap year? I'll speculate that someone's software didn't recognize it as such. Personally I'm always on the lookout for this sort of 'weird' thing because in the world of testing the edge cases are often poorly tested.