So today I discovered that there’s a cron job that holds non-reproducible state that died, and now our system is fucked.
The cron job doesn’t live inside any source control. This morning it entered a terminal state, and because it overwrites its state there’s no way to revert it.
I’m currently waiting for the database rollback and have rewritten it in a reproducible/idempotent way.
Just update your Clang library!
Why does this sound like maintaining my nextcloud instance from time to time?
AHAHAHAHAHAHA you couldn’t make this up
So do you work for Spotify or Zoom?
Probably DeepSeek.
What’s extra frustrating is the previous guy did create a git repo of these types of hacks, but this one doesn’t live in it for no discernible reason.
And a kbase with no entry for it.
Job security
But the whole point of the doomsday machine is lost… if you keep it a secret! Why didn’t you tell the world, eh?
It was going to be announced at his retirement party on Monday… You know the dev likes surprises.
He does charge a consulting fee to “fix” these issues
Almost all of them are dumb shit like this, where something is built in super hacky and dumbass ways.
Super hacky and dumb? Sign me up 😂
Me running all my services in tmux
that might be a stupid question, but why would you running all services in tmux be a bad idea? a co-worker of mine is doing exactly that right now, which is why I’m asking.
It’s not horrible, like it’ll do the job just fine, it’s just probably a better idea to use systemd and like, containers and whatnot, but I couldn’t be arsed to fiddle with all that for Jellyfin, caddy reverse proxy, and two modded Minecraft servers, so shell scripts and tmux won the day. It takes a little extra time to restart everything after an update, and maybe I’ll get the motivation to do things “correctly™” one day, but today is not that day.
thank you very much for the detailed response :)
Use the tmux resurrect plugin. It will restore your tmux session to its previous state after a restart, including programs if you like.
You can put off doing things “correctly™” even longer.
- They’re all gone when you restart
- It doesn’t properly deal with logging
- You can’t set up dependencies between services but that doesn’t matter due to point 1
I recommend using systemd services and/or docker compose instead. systemd services are files that describe which program / script to run and when (like after networking is active or after a certain other service is loaded).
Lmao
It’s his kill switch and he forgot to check in.
Smart man. This is how we fight being replaced by AI.
Judgement day postponed indefinitely due to “Object reference not set to an instance of an object”
I don’t know why but this is the first time I read this phrase and it actually makes sense.
I knew exactly what it meant before, but it didn’t make sense until now
Cron job that evals some base64 encoded string which is actually downloading a script from a personal GitHub repo of an IT guy who left…
And just started cleaning up their GitHub account…
We have a couple of those at work. Black boxes that are used.
I’m rebuilding one after it failed on one morning for SQL odbc reasons. And its just a binary that shuffles data around.
For us it’s a task that no one is even aware of and the first issue is the customer saying their data export doesn’t work. You had a data export?
Time to restore a whole machine backup to a VM with no network connectivity, and manually pull the command?
I was able to do that
Turns out there was a second bug which triggered this one, and a bug I found in this script that I thought was responsible was happening silently for months.
Now three bugs are squashed
This is almost exactly what happened to me on Monday, resulting in a fifteen hour day.
My particular jenga piece was an undocumented Access query that none of my predecessors had deigned to document or even tell me about… but was critical to run monthly or you had obsolete data embedded deep within multi-million dollar reports.
Thank god I don’t work on salary anymore, or I’d be really upset.
Oh god Access.
You have my condolences.
I stopped reading at “Access” and just wept a silent tear for you.
Ah yes, good old dependency.
What’s a cron job?
The executive branch of the US government.
An older way of automating stuff.
It’s not there by default nowadays, because systemd tends to fulfil their requirements.
Cron is a scheduler to run a program at a set frequency
Scheduled job, but implies that it uses a cron format.
I have also mixed up
crontab -lwithcrontab -r. 😔Let this be a lesson to start versioning your crontabs.
We never had our crons in source control, but I always saved it somewhere (usually on my machine and the target machine) so we had some history just in case of typing r instead of l for some reason. You can also create an alias called backupCrontab or something that runs the command for you and puts the output somewhere safe.
Only tangentially related, but “What a elegant house of cards” is an insult i’m going to use someday.
Somebody’s having a fun day! /s
