I just spent the past three days sans email due to an issue with my hosting company. The title of this post isn't to denigrate the hosting company because the situation wasn't entirely their fault. I used to do that type of work so I know how crazy it can get [1]. It also doesn't hurt that I know the owner, and I was able to provide some key information so they could fix the problem. The initial issue was fixed, but there was still an issue where it was only a few virtual servers (and mine was one of them) were still cut off from the Internet. It was my describing the situation in detail to Bunny that I had that “… and then this over here … wait a second … that's it!” moment that sovled the issue.
I then told the owner of the company, “all you need to do is reroute the tachyon emitter through the shield generator and transport Wesley 25 meters outside the ship to get this working.” Said technobabble was applied and my server was back online.
No, the title of this post is just a bit of commentary on the utter fragility of modern software [2] (link via Lobsters [3]) that this situation reminds me of. The fact that it took several engineers several days to get a virtual server back online is telling. That there are so many layers of abstraction that it's often hard to determine the root cause of the issue. That I suffered for nearly three days sans email!
Anyway … Happy New Year everybody! I'm just sad that this didn't happen [4] (link via Kirk Israel [5]). It would have been awesome!
[2] https://tonsky.me/blog/good-times-weak-men/
[3] https://lobste.rs/s/2ixhng/good_times_create_weak_men