otoh, if you somehow monitor if your web servers are working, you wouldn’t want your server to answer with 200 in the case the configuration is reset by error.

otoh, if you somehow monitor if your web servers are working, you wouldn’t want your server to answer with 200 in the case the configuration is reset by error. I mean, the real point is here : nobody cares what your server is answering just after being setup. However I can see how it’s a problem if for any reason, a server loses its configuration and still acts like everything is fine. (ofc you can bypass this by monitoring a more specific url but it’s not always possible if you are not the one deciding what the server serves) For your analogy, it’s more like you’d want your compiler to fail if you fed it with no source code.