TechTakes

I once helped one of my company's customers troubleshoot an issue that had seen the same ridiculous edge case error happen three times over the course of a few years. At one point the actual sustaining developer we worked with was able to narrow down a specific bit that was getting flipped somehow, and pitched that cosmic radiation was a plausible solution given how rarely this kind of thing impacted other customers.

It was at this point that we remembered that the customer was either a university with a nuclear physics lab or a hospital with a nuclear medicine program (can't remember now, ironically enough) that the server rack lived adjacent to.

some twenty four years ago i managed, amongst others, a company's samba and print server (that was at the time when all the company's servers were beige boxes with less memory and disk than the laptop i'm using to type this – and still they served a few hundred employees).

the machine developed a strange custom of hard-resetting itself, which we initially tracked to specific files being sent for printing; the behaviour was fully reproducible.

as it happened, it was a hardware fault somewhere between the mainboard and the integrated SCSI card; installing a separate SCSI card and reconnecting the disks and backup tape device fixed the problem. (i did not have the budget for a new serwer, no.)

establishing the actual cause took me fucking weeks.

@m @sailor_sega_saturn
Builds failing, but only at the new office, and only if you tried to build from scratch.

Funny, the Windows network crew that operated the network and suddenly had to operate NFS over UDP on their network, never really realized that their switches were only capable of half-duplex operation. But announced full-duplex. And these Linux boxes fully used that. And big UDP packages used by NFS under load got corrupted.