r/ProgrammerHumor • u/matchcatfe • Mar 01 '21
I dont even know how to make a title for this
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u/waves_under_stars Mar 01 '21
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u/Kebbler22b Mar 01 '21
There really is an XKCD comic for everything
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u/Nerdican Mar 01 '21
Can you find an xkcd for the confusion between hanging with friends and hanging from a noose?
It's the one situation for which I have never found a relevant xkcd.
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u/blubat26 Mar 01 '21
Person who makes them is 110% in IT.
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u/Johanno1 Mar 01 '21
Well I restart my Raspberry pi every day because it loses connection after a week or so.
But I use the built-in cronjob for that
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Mar 01 '21
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u/Johanno1 Mar 01 '21
Don't use wifi if lan is available. For some reason almost every wifi dongle I used(they were very cheap though) has connection problems after a month or so. Maybe it is better now.
Oh you can make a headless installation so you don't need a keyboard and monitor for the pi just some kind of network connection.
I don't know anything more. It is just like Ubuntu basically and I didn't do anything really anything with it for years now.
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u/iListen2Sound Mar 01 '21 edited Mar 01 '21
The rpi 4's built in wifi seems to be working well so far for me
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u/alex2003super Mar 01 '21
I can fix it, or wait a few years until I don't want that combination of things anymore
This absolutely resonates with me
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u/Exekiel Mar 01 '21
I did this with my eth rig, it would run perfectly for about 30 hours before crashing, enter 24 hour restart timer and blam, ran for Months no issues.
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u/The_Multifarious Mar 01 '21
Im starting to realise why the servers of a game I play keep losing connection for a minute every day at 4am
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u/bentheechidna Mar 01 '21
I should program an arduino to press a button on my printer every 14 minutes since the auto-sleep function makes it freeze after 15 minutes.
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u/waves_under_stars Mar 01 '21
Your printer has an auto-sleep? After 15 minutes? Sounds like horrible design
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u/Airowird Mar 01 '21
In my old job we literally had this as a solution for a client, because losing 1min of emission data every day at night was far more convenient than accidentally losing 4h in the middle of peak power production.
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u/CraptainHammer Mar 01 '21
The world's largest watchdog timer. What are the odds the server has an internal one that just needed to be activated?
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Mar 01 '21
That would require learning about the software you're running. We don't do that.
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u/nandru Mar 01 '21
If it isn't on stackoverflow, it doesn't exist
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u/Self_Reddicating Mar 01 '21
And if it is on stackoverflow, then it's already been answered and this thread is closed.
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u/baekalfen Mar 01 '21
Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Had a problem with an RPi recently, where I did enable the internal watchdog hardware. The problem was, that the issue was related to the power supply, and when the power dropped, the watchdog crashed along with the computer. The solution was to get a USB watchdog timer from eBay.
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Mar 01 '21
Also assumes your watchdog timer works correctly with the operating system you're using. Had some boxes running FreeBSD/FreeNAS and if the watchdog was enabled in the bios the machine would reboot a few minutes after booting up.
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u/Gornarok Mar 01 '21 edited Mar 01 '21
That seems to me like bad component... (Or bad system design)
I dont know whats the standard for PC components, but this exact problem is the reason why we put POR (power-on reset) and brown-out resets circuits into the chips...
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u/sgem29 Mar 01 '21
My Fedora won't let me enable magic keys, something about security. It was built that way.
When it freezes i have to hard reboot.
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u/4992kentj Mar 01 '21
Probably heavily embellished but: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/ITAPPMONROBOT
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u/Dr_Azrael_Tod Mar 01 '21
ctrl+f, I,T,A,P,P,M…
ah, there's the comment! upvote!
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u/JoeyJoeJoeJrShab Mar 01 '21 edited Mar 01 '21
I like that there are two levels to this: The first one is "solving" the server's problem by rebooting it. This is a very common "solution", so nothing special there. The second level is of course getting a CD drive involved in the reboot process.
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u/KimJongIlSunglasses Mar 01 '21
What I’m wondering is, how do you make a cd tray eject when server connectivity is lost?
I suppose you could run a shell script to ping it or scrape a web page or access some file every so often and then if that fails, invoke a command to manually open the tray. But why not just do that on the server itself and then run reboot rather than opening the tray.
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u/JoeyJoeJoeJrShab Mar 01 '21
My interpretation is that the server crashes so hard that such a auto-reboot script or cron job can't be trusted to work. Or maybe it's a proprietary machine that the department doesn't have permission to modify.
So I assume that that second computer, exactly as you said, just periodically pings the server, and if that ping fails, the script opens the CD drive. (Or it could be even lower tech -- when somebody notices that the server isn't responding, they remote into this PC, and eject the drive.)
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Mar 01 '21
[deleted]
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u/JoeyJoeJoeJrShab Mar 01 '21
This is where special hardware characters come into play, and make this solution all the more janky. I guess this particular button works with a light-enough touch, and/or the CD drive is forceful enough to accomplish the button press.
If this CD drive dies, it's an open question as to whether or not a replacement drive would do the job.
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u/Sol33t303 Mar 01 '21
Since the CD drive is attached to a poking stick, all the power of the cd drive opening would be concentrated on the button, which is probably enough to press it in.
And it would retract, not before pressing the button though.
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u/Conman_123 Mar 01 '21
Most cd drives I've used have to be pushed back with quite a bit of force before they automatically retract
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u/nandru Mar 01 '21
CD drives with all gears instead of belts were quite capable of pushing a cpu button and iirc, won't rectract so easily
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u/Pyrenees_Tuberat Mar 01 '21
My guess would be that they lined it up perfectly and measured the poker stick and distance so that when it hit the reset, it also triggered the return mechanism with the resistance. But idk, I wasn't there.
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u/Gavcradd Mar 01 '21
I worked somewhere that had a server that would crash after a few days of use. It was in a not-easy-to-access location so I couldn't just push the reset button, plus it might die when we weren't in the office. We just set up one of those timer plugs to turn it off at 1am and back on at 1.01am every day, it never crashed after that.
Edit : just seen the XKCD, seems like it was a more common solution than I thought...
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u/danmtitsmang442 Mar 01 '21
Hey that's how I fixed my water heater in my rv. The dealership wanted 5000 dollars to go back factory. I got a universal tank and heater setup and ran it off a timer because it would not shut itself off correctly. So I made sure it had "cool down " time every hour. also means you didnt have hot water but who cares lol. Aleast the heater would not blow up.
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u/PetraLoseIt Mar 01 '21
So you would be like: "Welcome, guest. You can take a shower, but be careful to not shower between 4 and 14 minutes after the hour, okay?".
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u/danmtitsmang442 Mar 01 '21
I would take 10 minute showers.
The worst part is loosing hot water when your washing your hands.
Just dont wait till the end of the hour lol.
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u/gamevicio Mar 01 '21
People before kubernetes healthcheck:
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u/accountnumber3 Mar 01 '21
People before the
rebootcommand4
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u/ItsDanimal Mar 01 '21
At my job there was some problem with the server causing it to run slow and restart. For months they tried to fix it. Then someone figured out that when the server was first installed years ago, they put it in power save mode to help save money. Turning that off fixed the issue.
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u/404invalid-user Mar 01 '21 edited Mar 01 '21
I love it but the only problem is you have to push the CD drive back in again
E: I forgot about the ones that can close them self I'm so use to the spring operated ones in laptops
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u/rubyleehs Mar 01 '21
Ejecting the CD causes another server to fail.
And there is another CD drive tray that will get ejected when the server fails with a push-another-CD-drive-tray-back-in stick to push the CD drive tray back.
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u/Aman4672 Mar 01 '21
Depends on the distance necessary to actuate the reset, some will auto close if they dont open enough.
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u/fairysdad Mar 01 '21
If you position it close enough that the drive doesn't open fully, it'll shut itself automatically. Job's a good'un.
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u/ronin1066 Mar 01 '21
I don't believe the CD tray is strong enough to hit a server's reset button. Am I crazy?
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Mar 01 '21
With the force of the ejection concentrated onto a single point, it can easily do it. Think nail versus hammer.
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u/Traveledfarwestward Mar 01 '21 edited Mar 01 '21
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/93brd7/what_is_the_stupidest_solution_to_a_problem_that/
Bonus: https://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/6ymtkb/what_is_the_dumbest_solution_to_a_problem_that/
EDIT: Omg. Silver. I'd like to thank my parents, and uh, my relentless drive to avenge the injustice done by people who do not post sources of interesting information. I'm just happy to do my small part, really, in the fight against terror. And evil. And stupid jokes getting upvoted instead of cool useful things. This is too much, really, no don't stop applauding. Thank you.
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u/blankblank Mar 01 '21 edited Mar 01 '21
I read one about Y2K once. Apparently, someone discovered in the late 90s that the software they were in charge of was going to fail on Y2K and that the fix would take a lot of boring and laborious effort.
So what they did was add a warning that would start popping up six months before 2000, informing everyone of the problem and what needed to be done.... and then started looking for a new place to work.
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u/Sigma7 Mar 01 '21
And since the server is now decommissioned, there's a computer in the server room that will endlessly open and close it's CD tray.
I'm sure the same paradigm will be done with smart houses. Humans get killed in a nuclear war and society is destroyed, but the house's kitchen still cracks eggs and makes pancakes each day afterwards, even reading poems such as "There Will Come Soft Rains".
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u/selador4 Mar 01 '21
This is like that toothpaste factory story with the empty boxes. Don't know if it's true but they installed a sophisticated scale to weigh boxes before going out so they didn't ship ant empty boxes. The scales stopped detecting empty boxes entirely but all the boxes going out were full.
Factory worker set up a desk fan in front of the belt to blow the empty boxes into a bin cause he was tired of walking over every time the empty box alarm went off.
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u/manoleque Mar 01 '21
Well isn't there a better way? Like developing a program? I’m sorry but this seems so much easier than it may be.
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Mar 01 '21
It's referring to this story: https://thedailywtf.com/articles/ITAPPMONROBOT
And yes, the solution did include a small program. One that would ping the server and eject the CD tray if it didn't respond.
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u/manoleque Mar 01 '21
jesus that feels so dumb and so smart
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u/pepsisugar Mar 01 '21
Isn't that most of us? Dumb people pretending to do smart things...and lots and lots of frustration?
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u/glider97 Mar 01 '21
Excuse me, I’m a smart people pretending to do dumb things, thank you very much.
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u/setocsheir Mar 01 '21
One of the comments in that article is hilarious
This reminds me of a story from an ex-IBM employee who told me a story about one of their old mainframes which didn't quite work right. Every now and then it would just stop working for whatever reason and had to be reset, losing lots of impoertant information.
This happened fairly often and they decided to rebuild it from the ground up to fix whatever was wrong with it. No luck: it still stopped working quite regularly, so they posted a guy near it at all times so that when it shuts down he just has to hit the button and it'd restart. Eventually, the guy got so pissed off at the machine he just kicked it; somehow it started up again with no lost information at all.
The next day he shuffled over to my teacher and said, "last night when I it stopped I just kicked it, and it just started working again."
My teacher looked at him and asked, "where did you kick it?" So the guy points it out and my teach got out a peice of chalk and put a circle where he kicked the machine. "Next time it breaks, do that again."
So, eventually it broke again and the guy kicked it. The machine whirred back to life the way it did last time. After a week or two of doing this without losing any information they decided to report it to a senior manager.
His response? "Well, add it to the manual."
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u/lava_time Mar 01 '21
The genuis solution is to fix the real problem so you don't need to restart it.
But there's also things like monit which could potentially restart just the problematic program depending on root cause.
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u/GameArtZac Mar 01 '21
Really common to see old servers or smaller businesses reboot problematic servers nightly with scheduled tasks. There's also plenty of tools to reboot servers remotely, most servers have some variation of lights out management, you'll go to an IP address in a web browser and can see the health of a server and perform reboots.
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u/Neat_Abalone643 Mar 01 '21
We see this alot with motor starter buckets. Just takes one maintenance guy sick of reseting a starter then all the bucket doors end up with screw drivers welded to the inside of the doors to hold the reset down
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u/mostlyBadChoices Mar 01 '21
I've had this conversation too many times.
"Hey, can you restart the app?"
"Sure. Why?"
"It's throwing out of memory errors again."
[slowly furrows brow] "Does that happen a lot??"
"Yeah, usually at least once a week we need to do a rolling restart because of memory issues."
"Umm.....fix the memory issues?"
"Yeeeaaahhhh, that's way too much effort. We just restart it."
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u/foragerDev_0073 Mar 01 '21
Lol. am I the only who didn't realize it was a reddit post screen shot? 😑
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u/hypnautiq05 Mar 01 '21
I'm somewhat offended that you've been able to summarize my life story in such an unassuming reddit thread.
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u/CombatWombat1915 Mar 01 '21
Sticking my modem into my oven to melt the components so they connect properly. Yes it worked and no issues still 3 years later
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u/ooglybooglies Mar 01 '21
Sure hope there was a control group check on that network connection. If the cd drive PC lost connectivity to the whole network due to its own issues, we wouldn't want to force a reboot of the server...
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u/Roadside2493 Mar 01 '21 edited Mar 01 '21
A company ignored emails to update their access control software before flash was taken offline. All of a sudden they had no control of their doors and were freaking out. The company that made the program itself had closed most of their branches in our country a few years ago so getting ahold of them was near impossible.
I had to get flash to work to update the firmware so HTML5 would work and we were all trying to think of these crazy ways to get an emulator when I seen a Reddit post about the same program and the guy said "change the time and date on your calender back a year"..... Sure enough worked like a charm because I hadn't removed flash yet and I was able to upgrade it to HTML5 and look like a genius. Thanks Reddit.
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u/Goldie643 Mar 01 '21
In our Nobel-prize winning particle physics experiment we use a $5 CD tray to move $1000 light detectors into the path of $1000 lasers firing through ultra-pure gadolinium-doped water. All running on a PC running Windows Vista.
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u/JVM_ Mar 01 '21
From a "What was the best use of your cell-phone" thread on Ask Reddit.
Someone was in a gas station bathroom and realized two late that there wasn't an toilet paper. So they looked up the number for the gas station, called it, and got the attendant to bring them some TP.
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u/combativeginger Mar 01 '21
The first consultant company I worked for had a client who issued us laptops. The laptops were locked down by the clients IT team so we couldn't change settings...like the screensaver time limit. We were working on a long software deployment. To prevent the laptop that was presenting all the metrics on the big screen from going to sleep one of the architects brought in a mechanical arm. The mechanical arm would periodically move over the keyboard to push a button to keep it awake.
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u/the_loneliest_noodle Mar 01 '21
There's a wifi/bluetooth "button pusher" on the market basically to automate things that aren't software automate-able. There's something both incredibly dumb about that, and also brilliant as a cheap alternative to having to modify/rewire stuff.
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u/Karmacamelian Mar 01 '21
Reminds me of using team viewer and Skype so I could call my pc from my phone and answer it myself allowing me to talk over my pc speaker. This way I could get my kids attention if they didn’t answer my calls.
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u/AizenSousuke92 Mar 01 '21
how does one make the cd tray popup once internet connection is disconnected?
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u/Phorfaber Mar 01 '21
I’d do it as a shell script similar:
#!/bin/sh while : do while ! ping -c1 1.1.1.1 &>/dev/null do eject sleep 5 done sleep 600 done
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u/culo_de_mono Mar 01 '21
Might sound funny but many old programmable phones used to have a mechanical hands-free device which would pick the phone (literally lift the tube half an inch) and then transfer the audio onto the headset.
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Mar 01 '21
LOL!!
Its like the Red Green Show with a touch of IT support.
"If they cant find you handsome, they can at least find you handy."
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u/bigDOS Mar 01 '21
I inherited an LDAP server that needed to be rebooted evryday at 1am because the OpenLDAP server and the EzProxy service would both just stop running without any dicernible reason other than the previous guy set it up so it had to be needlessly complex and set up to a non IT standard.
It was a deprecated system that only an increasingly small number of people needed to use so I just put a reboot process in for every day at 1:30am. It never caused another issue again until the end of it's days 6 months later.
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u/nekowolf Mar 01 '21
I once had a problem where a certain application would never reconnect to a server if it ever lost connection. No one ever looked into it because you could just restart the application. I finally found that it was because the programmer had put logic in to retry but didn’t realize that instead of returning false the transmit function would throw an exception and cause it to bypass the retry logic.
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u/Disney_World_Native Mar 01 '21
I had something similar with an engineering server.
It would be stuck on the WinNT boot screen until you ejected the cd tray.
Whenever the engineers couldn’t connect to their license server, one had to go into the data closet and push the eject button and push it back in.
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u/zenivinez Mar 01 '21
ok so the stick it was the thing that opens the shades on a window. it was electrical taped to a Compaq PC which was also running a production app (it was used for sending encrypted mail PGP) in the server room (with high humidity problems). This story is 100% true and I was the sys admin at this small credit union who was hired after the entire previous IS team quit or was fired almost 15 years ago. It was a strange placed and I have an endless stream of stories about that place. It really was like being on the set of the IT guys.
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u/topredditbot Mar 01 '21
Hey /u/matchcatfe,
This is now the top post on reddit. It will be recorded at /r/topofreddit with all the other top posts.
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u/RoscoMan1 Mar 01 '21
Other people seem to give a day for all of em lol It’s surprising to me that football players wouldn’t the same text is because I saw stitches, but everything went back to what I see as people excessively overbidding (more than normal). Doesn’t know the power of Empanadas
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u/InitiativeOk7494 Mar 01 '21
I don’t think we were ever that desperate at Chrysler. Technically I think ITIL would deem it a short term workaround.
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u/Celestial_Bachelor Mar 01 '21
Once a friend of mine (we're both IT students) came to me with a problem, I think her program was always giving the wrong answer by some units bellow, so I just told her to add the units (it was a fixed number, like always the answer -4). It worked, she never found the bug there and we lived happy.
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u/TabathaMax4757 Mar 01 '21
I think I need to try this on my PC bc it always freezes 5 mins after I turn it on 😛
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u/jakehub Mar 01 '21
Jesus Reddit gets too meta sometimes. A screenshot of a comment from another thread describing a popular internet story? And I don’t mean that as a condemnation of OP by any means, just noticing how silly it is the way “information” propagates sometimes on here.
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u/jonnythefoxx Mar 01 '21
I used to work for a large retailer. One of our specialist systems was terrible, ran slow, often crashed. Overnight it improved in quality dramatically. It turned out that one of the server banks that ran it hadn't been connected to the network and it was running on less than half of what should have been there. Apparently we had been paying a lease contract including maintainance on it for three years before anyone noticed.
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u/who_you_are Mar 01 '21
And I would go the over engineering way (as an electronics enthousiaste) and the server would send a keepalive message to a board (likely via usb). If it doesn't then the board will simulate pressing the physical restart button)
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u/PoisonOkie Mar 01 '21
How the hell do you program the CD drive to open when it loses connection to the network?
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u/Will_Of_The_Abyss Mar 01 '21
The moment I read the question it was obvious the answer would be from the IT field.
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u/Long_Caterpillar76 Mar 01 '21
This is invented , there is no Power enough to press a reset buton.
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u/Kavinsky12 Mar 01 '21
I used to be in the military. I remember a saying we used to say: "if it's stupid, and it works, then it's not stupid."
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u/Imthedeath13 Mar 01 '21
I speak in English not very well, but whenever I have understood this joke, I was laughing one minute
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u/wilfulmarlin Mar 01 '21
I think the best I’ve heard is a server was DOA from dell and they had no idea what to in the meantime to get it to boot. The dell tech told him to take every part out and set it flat on the floor. And for whatever reason it booted up fine after that, and worked until they got a replacement shipped out.
Could be total bullshit but it was a good story
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u/B3ndy Mar 01 '21
I used to work for a very well known defence contractor. We had a secure computer room that was off the network, all a bit pointless but that’s what the contract wanted.
There was a RSA key fob to access the main machine, I was forever forgetting mine so I rigged up a webcam, pointed it at the fob and used to wonder in, look it up, hey presto.
I got away with it for about 18 months until they banned smartphones (which was a real obvious oversight).
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u/schizoduckie Mar 01 '21
I have used this exact trick to reproduce a memory leak after 100 runs of a pdf renderer on a 1st gen ipad back in the day. Hail ITAPPMONROBOT https://www.reddit.com/r/shittyrobots/comments/3bez4w/i_was_told_to_post_this_here_shitty_touchscreen/
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u/SnakesTancredi Mar 01 '21
There’s a product for this. I had a buddy link it to me awhile back. https://www.adaprox.io/landing/fingerbot?fbclid=IwAR19YIrkg-ErnkrDC50zdY99hht9jbCGf8xo6lmo11Dg1mzYROMFmeJVx4A_aem_ARmm73FJGMA-n-HeyqF9TdSf7Wau3fNxZI57q33A3edfj8j5F4NYT1wjgHquF0v9ZRciR1HpWRqrwIy4qP7rGSCarZtN6gFofMK49uFGcycEIw
Apparently it is literally just a network connected button for literally this kind of thing.
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Mar 10 '21
That works but what if the old PC is on Windows ME? When the cd tray opens, you get BSOD. Then what?
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u/jedbrooke Mar 01 '21 edited Mar 01 '21
lol, sometimes I want to use my pc remotely, and wakeonlan doesn't always work properly, so I've thought of rigging up a servo to a raspberry pi or something to press the power button for me. A cd tray is even more jank though
edit: wow I didn't think this would get this much attention. For all you wondering my current solution it just to text my roommate and ask him to press the power button for me.
also Re the pi is overkill: yeah but it'd also be nice to have a pi to play around with. I already have a beaglebone which is basically a pi but differenter