Matthew GarrettWondering why a bunch of my network infrastructure was weirdly slow and finally discovered that the cable to one of my switches had come loose on my router and the eero plugged into that switch had lapsed back into wireless backhaul and was happily routing everything else plugged into that switch via wireless instead but my wireless backhaul is absolute dogshit so everything sucked
My network topology does not seem especially complicated but it's already complicated enough that things can break in ways that cause abject confusion so clearly I should just get into BGP because how could that possibly be worse
("Why do you post like this, Matthew" I hear none of you say, but I respond anyway. Because growing up I never saw people who knew things about computers talk about how everything was broken most of the time and so I assumed that I was doing something wrong, and now I am here to tell you that despite being *extremely* computer my stuff is randomly broken all the time and it takes me far too long to figure it out, so it's not you we just build things that humans are bad at handling)
Dave Townsend@mjg59 I constantly worry that at some point I am going to die and then my family are going to be left with the complete mess of a network that they see as "working perfectly" but actually requires constant poking to keep running smoothly
@Mossop I have meaningful documentation along with a "If this is too complicated you can do this instead and it will work less well but it will work" plan
Clifton Royston
Wouter Verhelst@CliftonR
A friend once told me a story of a guy who suddenly passed away of a heart attack while working on an overhaul of one of his customers' networks and websites. He'd moved things to his own servers while reinstalling the customer's kit, then when he passed away and his next of kin stopped paying the bills for the server, suddenly the customer's entire network stopped working.
@mjg59 @Mossop
A friend once told me a story of a guy who suddenly passed away of a heart attack while working on an overhaul of one of his customers' networks and websites. He'd moved things to his own servers while reinstalling the customer's kit, then when he passed away and his next of kin stopped paying the bills for the server, suddenly the customer's entire network stopped working.
@mjg59 @Mossop
I actually know a vaguely similar story involving a very well-liked guy from a mailing list I used to be on.
He got a cancer diagnosis requiring him to go on heavy-duty chemotherapy and was keeping a very positive attitude ("I'm going to beat this with my doctors' help!") His first or second chemotherapy session, the drugs triggered a sudden heart attack and he died.
He had been running an OpenSRS-based domain registry, and nobody else knew the PWs.