Ljubljana, Slovenia

Posts

Mon, Sep 5, 2011

Mysteries of system administration ...

You have two servers, you have the same scripts available on the two servers. The scripts are run via ‘crontab’, which has the same version on both servers. They have the same operating system. The scripts use ‘perl’, which is the same version on both servers. Script works on both servers, but throws locale warnings on server B. In the end, the solution was to edit /etc/environment (deprecated). Somehow crontab still uses this file, and the file was empty on the working server, and set to an old (also deprecated) charset on the other.

The Billion Dollar Session Cookie

Marissa Mayer is the VP of geographic and local services at Google. When speaking at the Velocity 2009 conference, she mentioned what was since described as “The Billion Dollar HTML Tag”. The presented problem was that with Google’s vast user base, an inefficiently implemented landing page feature might cost them millions of dollars of lost revenue somewhere down the line. Change in perception is sometimes needed, to recognize something trivial as something you need to pay attention to.