Remote
tie
@tie@infosec.exchange
mastodon 4.8.0-alpha.3+glitch5 Followers
52 Following
12 Posts
Joined December 21, 2022
Replying to
@markd @dangoodin
It is likely happening much more often than people think. In 2023, I had an elusive DNS error on my hands and tracked it down to 2 out of 4 "physical" servers behind 1 out of 13 root server names being out-of-date in a _single_ geography (Japan).
Any query hitting the two unfortunate hosts would get out-of-date response, which included an expired DNSSEC signature. With an invalid DNSSEC signature, well-behaved recursive resolvers would throw on the ground any response coming from that server. In other words, DNS resolution was completely broken.
Guess what? Almost nobody saw that problem. DNS is so redundant. The query would generally be retried, and then it would hit a healthy root server. Multiple times on the DNS layer, and then potentially more times on the application layer. The rest of the world was oblivious to it, and even in Japan it would have been perceived as connectivity noise.
After discovering the issue, I contacted the operators of that root and they resolved it in a few hours. 0 apocalypses took place.
With all the brainpower at their disposal, Google Cloud couldn't figure out how to let users limit their monthly spend? The best they came up with is "We'll email you" and "Here is a pub-sub topic for ya"
#enshittification at work
I wish I had seen this lecture 11 years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vtIzMaLkCaM
As usual, the next best time is now.
LEADERSHIP LAB: The Craft of Writing Effectively
When you go deep into a subject - like a codebase or another knowledge area - the width of your understanding naturally grows as you make more probes. However, if your probes are shallow, you cannot grow depth simply by making more of them.
IOW, depth of knowledge leads to width over time, but the opposite is not true.
I feel like this asymmetry should have a name.
Something I've historically been pretty good at.
Software tools are now being judged by a new standard: how easily they can be wielded by AI agents. Welcome to the era of AI-rgonomics.
That's especially true for programming languages. Armin Ronacher has an interesting post on the subject: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2026/2/9/a-language-for-agents/
https://www.eu-inc.org - yes, please!
Trying to debug intricate PostgreSQL performance issue n GCP cloud? You get the visibility... of a cloud.
#GCP #CloudSQL #postgresql people, please allow your users to turn on `track_wal_io_timing` for the love of humanity!
"We need more change management!" actually suggests "We need change of management".