The Official Status Thread
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@dkf Oh. OK. Lucky you.
Sometimes I hunt for the commit first because it's the fastest way to get into just why a bug came into existence. Or, indeed, the root cause.
What would be a representative example...? Maybe this: The SNMP stopped working in one of our products once. It was only noticed when we were just about to ship to one customer that actually wants that feature. I'm the only one that worked on the codebase during the timeframe when the bug could have been introduced, and I was still baffled. Long story short, the thing ran out of socket resources in lwIP. I'd broken it simply by adding a listener for ModbusTCP. So, well, you can see why it was faster to look for the commit that caused the bug to appear...?
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@acrow I think possibly my most obscure bug was triggered when I removed a small global variable. Or added one, it's been a while.
This triggered global memory to be laid out differently by the compiler, and resulted in a pre-existing use of position 0x10000 in a 0x10000-slot array actually conflicting with something else that actually got used.
I don't recall for certain how I found this bug, but probably it was one of the few times I used
gdb
and data watches.
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@acrow said in The Official Status Thread:
Long story short, the thing ran out of socket resources in lwIP.
We find those fairly easily: our products log verbosely when they run out of critical resources. We try very hard to ensure that we control exactly what's going on (and have both good tracking and code to compare the tracking model versus what's on the hardware).
When we had the firmware corrupting the ARP cache, that was “fun”. Only happened in prod — testing had a different, quieter networking environment — and the only manifestation was that sometimes messages would go completely missing and all hell would break loose. Turned out to be a release of the ethernet buffer back to the network hardware was a few instructions too early, but it was a bugger to find (and I ended up finding it by looking for anything that smelt like use-after-free, which was a prelude to chasing down what I thought was the problem, a failure to release some other buffers in some circumstances).
Bisecting with firmware is tricky, as it's not exactly the easiest to deploy in the first case. Doubly so when it only builds correctly with a compiler that I don't have a license key for. (Don't know why the ARM commercial compiler generates tighter code, but it does; using gcc results in code that's too large to deploy.)
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@dkf said in The Official Status Thread:
Don't know why the ARM commercial compiler generates tighter code, but it does
It only targets ARM, while GCC is a generic compiler which supports many architectures. You can usually get better solutions when you reduce the scope of the problem.
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@dkf Should we start a new thread on networking oopses?
Here's another:
Our devices, specifically the Slave nodes, were randomly rebooting at one site in the field. I thought that my HTTP parser was failing, so I made it more paranoid and strict, making less assumptions about the input string. When this update was pushed to the site, communication from the Master broke down entirely. However, the Slaves were still reachable via regular browser just fine. Turned out, the guy who wrote the Master had written his own HTTP code too, but hadn't read the specification, and the HTTP queries were wildly off spec. I brow-beat him to use a proper library, since the Master is basically a Linux box, so HTTP query libraries are plentiful, as were resources.Bonus:
The real cause of the random reboots was a loose RJ-45 cable that swung around with vibration and disconnected intermittently, which the Master noticed, cutting the TCP pipe every time, several times per second. The Slaves didn't take dozens of dangling TCP connections too well.Takeaways:
lwIP is a pain to configure resourcing for. I have yet to find a good how-to guide.
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Status: Vacation in Berlin. Randomly walked into a club I found on Google. Admission was €25. Holy what?!
Oh ok, so apparently drinks are free. Well, I didn’t intend to get drunk but since I paid for it: challenge accepted.
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Status: quite inebriated at a concert... Where they inexplicably put a country band between two metal bands?
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@error Wtf is this shit
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@topspin said in The Official Status Thread:
Status: Vacation in Berlin. Randomly walked into a club I found on Google. Admission was €25. Holy what?!
Oh ok, so apparently drinks are free. Well, I didn’t intend to get drunk but since I paid for it: challenge accepted.This was a bad idea.
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Status: arena is spinning
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I feel that, once @Tsaukpaetra gets around to reading this last series of posts, he'll feel somewhat vindicated concerning particular lifestyle choices
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Thursday status: got new car
Friday status: got license plates and insurance
Saturday status: got speeding ticket
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@Gąska said in The Official Status Thread:
Thursday status: got new car
Friday status: got license plates and insurancw
Saturday status: got speeding ticket
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@Tsaukpaetra oh, so maybe you can tell me this. How much does one speeding ticket impact insurance premiums?
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@Gąska said in The Official Status Thread:
@Tsaukpaetra oh, so maybe you can tell me this. How much does one speeding ticket impact insurance premiums?
Haven't seen yet actually. I expect a ten percent increase or so.
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Status: I hope I didn’t steal a tiger.
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Status: a dragonfly landed right outside my window. Holy shit, it's huge! Almost the size of my hand. I've never actually seen one of these around here before. Or anywhere else.
I'm really glad I didn't have the window open.
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@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
@Gąska said in The Official Status Thread:
@Tsaukpaetra oh, so maybe you can tell me this. How much does one speeding ticket impact insurance premiums?
Haven't seen yet actually. I expect a ten percent increase or so.
Where's that? In the States?
Around here, there are so many camera traps that everyone has a ticket or two. Far as I know, the insurance companies just plain ignore them, as long as they didn't result in jailtime.
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@acrow Over here my insurance company doesn’t even know about my speeding tickets.
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@Gąska said in The Official Status Thread:
Thursday status: got new car
Friday status: got license plates and insurance
Saturday status: got speeding ticketNext step must be crashing it
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@dcon said in The Official Status Thread:
@Captain said in The Official Status Thread:
Used random orbital polisher to apply Rain-X on windshield, rear window, and front side windows. Waiting for rain.
We'll be waiting for about 2 more months...
Got some yesterday (finally!!!!)
Windshield success.
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@acrow said in The Official Status Thread:
@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
@Gąska said in The Official Status Thread:
@Tsaukpaetra oh, so maybe you can tell me this. How much does one speeding ticket impact insurance premiums?
Haven't seen yet actually. I expect a ten percent increase or so.
Where's that? In the States?
Yes. If it was Europe, there would be no question.
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It's an amazing coincidence how every band I've seen live was performing at their absolute favorite city.
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Status: Buying a socket set and torque wrench so I can install my own winter tires instead of going to some tire place ($$) or the dealership ($$$$)
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@hungrier winter? What's that. And why so soon? There's at least another month before the weather cools below "steam bath", and then it'll only get to "comfortable" at worst.
/Florida-man
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@error said in The Official Status Thread:
It's an amazing coincidence how every band I've seen live was performing at their absolute favorite city.
What's the sample size?
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@Gąska: I think you -ed.
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@Zerosquare or maybe it is a truly amazing coincidence.
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Status: A number that Google identifies as "Living Spaces" is calling. At fucking 11pm. What the shit.
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This sounds like the beginning of a horror movie.
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[b]Status</b>: Confused and Confusticated.</p>
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@Vixen welcome to the forums!
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@Tsaukpaetra Thanks!
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Status: I love when bots are too stupid to poke at Master Server a little too frequently...
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@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
Status: A number that Google identifies as "Living Spaces" is calling. At fucking 11pm. What the shit.
Living Spaces is an actual store. The odds that caller id was spoofed? I can't count that high.
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@dcon said in The Official Status Thread:
@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
Status: A number that Google identifies as "Living Spaces" is calling. At fucking 11pm. What the shit.
Living Spaces is an actual store. The odds that caller id was spoofed? I can't count that high.
I know, but it's made slightly more into the realm of plausible since (I believe) there was a recent purchase by this household from that particular store...
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@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
@dcon said in The Official Status Thread:
@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
Status: A number that Google identifies as "Living Spaces" is calling. At fucking 11pm. What the shit.
Living Spaces is an actual store. The odds that caller id was spoofed? I can't count that high.
I know, but it's made slightly more into the realm of plausible since (I believe) there was a recent purchase by this household from that particular store...
Ah. Then it's stoopid out-sourced contractors half-way round the world who can't tell what fucking time it is.
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@dcon said in The Official Status Thread:
@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
@dcon said in The Official Status Thread:
@Tsaukpaetra said in The Official Status Thread:
Status: A number that Google identifies as "Living Spaces" is calling. At fucking 11pm. What the shit.
Living Spaces is an actual store. The odds that caller id was spoofed? I can't count that high.
I know, but it's made slightly more into the realm of plausible since (I believe) there was a recent purchase by this household from that particular store...
Ah. Then it's stoopid out-sourced contractors half-way round the world who can't tell what fucking time it is.
We'll never know...
Because I only know about the calls because it was a watch that was showing the call notification, and naturally I didn't answer.
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Status: Combed all the Azure resources looking to save money.
Deleted a tonne of things, should equate to about $15 savings next month!
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Status: Wasn't paying attention and accidentally ordered the same thing from two different stores.
Well I guess I can play with two ATA devices instead of just one...
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Status: Replacing my apparently-slowly-dying spinning-rust drive with an SSD...
The next trick will be swapping the Z and D letters such that Windows doesn't panic too much (a not-insignificant portion of my user profile is on secondary, and Windows does not like it very much when chunks of the profile are gone when logging in...).
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@Tsaukpaetra You should make sure that all requests matching
*.php
result in an instant block.
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Statuses, now 2 for the price of 1:
Going through withdrawal symptoms after (voluntarily) cutting ties with my other major forum community over forum culture and especially over-zealous moderation which made it impossible to talk about anything. And having anger issues due to people being wrong on the internet.
Also...I'm only 1/10 of the way through this school year...and I'm already continually exhausted. As I drive to work, I find myself imagining the time when I can instead just drive elsewhere and not return. It's gonna be a long 8.5 months
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Status: Drove to work. Woke up out of driving autopilot fog (the kind where you're awake but everything but navigating and avoiding the other idiots on the road just fades out into an indistinct murmur). Looked around. Where the fuck am I? This isn't work. Ask Google's AI to navigate me to work. Discover I drove 40 minutes in the wrong direction. Yaaaaaay.
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@Vixen said in The Official Status Thread:
Ask Google's AI to navigate me to work.
Sounds more like it's driving you to drink.
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@dkf said in The Official Status Thread:
@Vixen said in The Official Status Thread:
Ask Google's AI to navigate me to work.
Sounds more like it's driving you to drink.
would be news to me.... i lose more alcohol to evaporation than i drink.
still the rate of evaporation of the vodka has gone up dramatically recently...
Nah, that's got to be just a coincidence and it'll turn out i didn't properly cap the bottle so the seal was particularly bad.
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@Vixen said in The Official Status Thread:
so the seal was particularly bad
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There's nothing like paying an extortionate toll to still get stuck in traffic.