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This sounds a lot like the occasional support request that comes in to me.... At first it's dis-believable and impossible, and you think the person is crazy, b

This sounds a lot like the occasional support request that comes in to me.... At first it's dis-believable and impossible, and you think the person is crazy, but after "troubleshooting" something rational pops up. I can't tell you how many times this has happened. But it really doesn't help having a product/service that manages (on Windows) an underlining system of Virtual Hosts, dozens of configuration files, Apache, PHP, and MySQL, and a bunch of other software and tools (http://www.devside.net/server/webdeveloper http://www.devside.net/server/webdeveloper).

pavel_lishin 14y ago
It very much reminds me of one time when I had a spare screw that had fallen behind the motherboard, in the case. Every once in awhile, I'd bump my desk and the computer would shut down, and wouldn't boot until I thumped it. ("Russian components, American components, ALL MADE IN TAIWAN!") Completely baffled me until I was upgrading something with a friend, and he found the little guy rattling around.
- mikeash 14y ago
  My favorite example of this was a user who wrote to me about audio streaming software that he could use with classical music, but that disconnected when used to stream rock and roll. After a great deal of highly baffling troubleshooting, I finally figured it out. The streaming software sent the music over UDP, where each packet contained a pre-set amount of audio encoded with a lossless codec. Classical compresses better than rock, so it generated smaller UDP packets. The guy had somehow managed to set the MTU of his LAN interface to 1200 bytes, and the software was using IPv6, which doesn't do IP-level fragmentation when the MTU is below 1280 bytes. When playing classical music, every audio packet was less than 1200 bytes. When playing rock, an occasional packet would not compress well and end up too large, then fail to send. The software would then abort the connection in response to the error.
  - greatquux 14y ago
    Wow, that is absolutely insane. You get major kudos for going to all that trouble to find out the answer to that one.
    - lsh 14y ago
      Agreed - you are my hero for today.
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]

pavel_lishin 14y ago

It very much reminds me of one time when I had a spare screw that had fallen behind the motherboard, in the case. Every once in awhile, I'd bump my desk and the computer would shut down, and wouldn't boot until I thumped it. ("Russian components, American components, ALL MADE IN TAIWAN!") Completely baffled me until I was upgrading something with a friend, and he found the little guy rattling around.

mikeash 14y ago
My favorite example of this was a user who wrote to me about audio streaming software that he could use with classical music, but that disconnected when used to stream rock and roll. After a great deal of highly baffling troubleshooting, I finally figured it out. The streaming software sent the music over UDP, where each packet contained a pre-set amount of audio encoded with a lossless codec. Classical compresses better than rock, so it generated smaller UDP packets. The guy had somehow managed to set the MTU of his LAN interface to 1200 bytes, and the software was using IPv6, which doesn't do IP-level fragmentation when the MTU is below 1280 bytes. When playing classical music, every audio packet was less than 1200 bytes. When playing rock, an occasional packet would not compress well and end up too large, then fail to send. The software would then abort the connection in response to the error.
- greatquux 14y ago
  Wow, that is absolutely insane. You get major kudos for going to all that trouble to find out the answer to that one.
  - lsh 14y ago
    Agreed - you are my hero for today.
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]