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Emergencies will audit the shit out of you

Things never go wrong at convenient times: Like when you’re auditing the latest, coolest version of your app, and looking for bugs. Things have a funny way of working out fine then. However, soon as you look the other way, a multitude of problems come out of the woodwork. It usually goes something like this:

One server goes down, and the system that was supposed to fail silently starts screaming. The application it was supporting goes down, because the proper timeouts and error handling was never written. You can’t fail over, because failing over will take down 2 other applications. When that first server comes back up, nothing works, because the proper startup scripts were never put in place. Once the right services start, if you can remember what the hell they were, you find the original application is configured wrong. Not only is it configured wrong, it’s always been configured wrong, and no one noticed. No one noticed because it only explodes in the exact set of horrible circumstances you have right now. Which is, by the way, being down.

It’s an all-too-familiar story, and one that even most the anal of admins has dealt with. The fact of the matter is that it is going to happen, and there’s not a whole lot you can do to prepare, other than randomly pulling plugs out of servers. But with any mistake that causes downtime, it should only happen once. Proper postmortem examination needs to be taken here to figure out what went wrong where. Once all the variables are understood, the next step is to duplicate the same set of circumstances in your sandbox, and apply the necessary error handling.

Downtime and emergencies are a part of running any site. What’s really important is to treat emergencies as an opportunity to learn about what happens when systems fail, for real.

Published Oct 20, 2010

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