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The full maxim I was taught being, “it’s either DNS or permissions”. The fatal design flaw for the Domain Name System was failure to learn from SCSI, viz. that
by inopinatus 1y ago
The full maxim I was taught being, “it’s either DNS or permissions”.
The fatal design flaw for the Domain Name System was failure to learn from SCSI, viz. that it should always be possible to sacrifice a goat to whatever gods are necessary to receive a blessing of stability. It hardly remains to observe that animal sacrifice is non-normative for IETF standards-track documents and the consequences for distributed systems everywhere are plainly evident.
Goats notwithstanding, I think it is splitting hairs to suggest that the phrase “it’s always DNS” is erroneously reductive, merely because it does not explicitly convey that an adjacent control-plane mechanism updating the records may also be implicated. I don’t believe this aphorism drives a misconception that DNS itself is an inherently unreliable design. We’re not laughing it off to the extent of terminating further investigation, root-cause analysis, or subsequent reliability and consistency improvement.
More constructively, also observe that the industry standard joke book has another one covering us for this circumstance, viz. “There are only two hard problems in distributed systems: 2. Exactly-once delivery 1. Guaranteed order of processing 2. Exactly-once delivery”
- throw0101a 1y agoA SCSI bus always needed three terminations: one at either end of the cable, and a black rooster.
- whatever1 1y agoWhy Computers engineers refuse to talk with manufacturing graybeards that operate critical systems at scale ? The design shit I am seeing would not pass at a chemical plant not even a preliminary review.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 1y agoI don't know any manufacturing graybeards. Where could I meet some?
- whatever1 1y agoConferences! IEEE, AICHE, IMTS, Fabtech, Automate, Productronica
- throwaway_dang 1y agoI would greatly appreciate a concrete example, search term, or book if you can think of one.
- ammmir 1y agowhat is the connection with SCSI?
- bestham 1y agoSCSI had a reputation of being very stable and yet very finicky. Stable in the sense that not using the CPU for transfers yielded good performance and reliability. The finicky part was the quality of equipment (connectors, adapters, cables and terminators) something that led to users having to figure out the best order of connecting their devices in a chain that actually worked. “Hard drive into burner an always the scanner last.”
- cbsmith 1y agoWe used to joke that it should be called SCSl: System, Cables, Scanner last.