text stringlengths 0 2.68k |
|---|
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah, it was a fun story. So we lived in this university town and we were quite late to get the cable modem. And it may be interesting to know that in Europe, in many places, if you had dial-up internet, it was actually charged by the hour. So we had no local free calls as in other places, so it was a ... |
And so I got on my bicycle - this being the Netherlands - and I drove to the cable company. And on my way there, I was like "Yeah, this could end up really well, or I could end up being arrested", because I'd just waltzed into their systems. And it ended up really well. A little bit too well, because that was the dotco... |
But it was quite cool. It was very nice to scale an internet service provider from like 50 users to 50,000 users. Everyone should maybe one day scale a company by three orders of magnitude. It's very educational. So I had a great time there. And it was a wonderful way of sort of learning how to run an internet service ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, you can't mess around at that stage. You've got to have the uptime, right? All the nines. |
**Jerod Santo:** So what were some of your learnings as you scaled up? These are kind of like the first time things are scaling up, so you can't exactly go read a book about it, right? |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah. I actually wondered if anyone had written the book about it, but I don't think we had that rate of scaling that we had in 2001, where you would double every month, or something like that. One of the main things I learned there is that it was quite amateur stuff. So you need to professionalize and... |
For example, at one point I did take down the whole internet service provider, because I had fixed a bug in the LDAP server and I was very pleased with myself that I had fixed that bug... So I shut down my laptop and I went home. And I had forgotten that I left the LDAP server running in the foreground. And the moment ... |
**Jerod Santo:** Well, unintended consequences, right? You just don't know what's going to happen. You shut that laptop, think you're done for the day... |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah. Well, there is one really interesting thing that I learned there, and I've been passing on this message since forever, and I'm also going to pass it on to your listeners. |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. |
**Bert Hubert:** \[08:00\] So we had a redundant email setup. And we thought it was good, it was redundant... So there was this guy in charge there and he said "Well, are you sure this is redundant?" I said "Yeah, it's all redundant." And then he pulled the plug on one of our servers. And then everything broke, because... |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** That's not a good thing, you know. Pull the plug, things fall over. |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah, yeah. Well, it's a good thing. I mean, if people say "Look, it's sort of redundant in the sense that we can make it work again", okay. That's fine. That's my level of expectation that something could fail over and you could rapidly make it good again. |
But if you're telling me that "Look, this is going to be automatically redundant, and it's going to work anyhow", then I should feel free to just unplug some stuff to see what happens. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** We all learn those lessons to some degree, right? Like, whenever you think something is safe and secure, or redundant, or whatever you might want to call it, and then chaos engineering happens, essentially, you know? |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah. And you only learn that, you only learn that -- recently I've been... I mean, we might come to that. Recently, I'm now running some actual services again that people depend on 24 seven, and everyone has to sort of live through that for a bit. It's experience being on the line. Like, people are re... |
**Jerod Santo:** This is why I've been trying to convince Adam to run our Zulip community from his home office... Like, just host it for us. Self host that sucker. We've only got a few hundred people using it, but they're using it all throughout the day. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** For the learnings? |
**Jerod Santo:** Yeah. And for that upgrade of yourself, just what it feels like to have people depending on your service. It changes you. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Okay... I'm not against it necessarily. It's just I prefer not to. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] |
**Bert Hubert:** I mean, I get that feeling. I really understand, because it really sucks. Because once you have that stuff running in your house, you have to start planning around things, because you can not just have an electrician come over and redo your wiring and be like "Yeah, we're going to be down for three hou... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, for sure. |
**Jerod Santo:** So straight out of university, I ran some mail servers on a Linux network for a company, maybe a few hundred people. And there were two servers, and they worked in conjunction, and there was Spam Assassin, and it's all kinds of stuff. There was PostFix... And when we had issues, it would just queue up.... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[laughs\] |
**Jerod Santo:** And then I used to love just watching that queue just work its way down back to zero. I definitely know the feeling of other people relying on your network services. It can be stressful. |
**Bert Hubert:** It can be. It can be. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah... Unnecessarily, if it's unnecessary. |
**Jerod Santo:** Right. If you've got someone else to do it for you, why do it, right? Bert, what are you running these days? You said you're running some stuff now? |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah. So I built a sort of parliamentary monitoring system. So we have also an upper chamber and a lower chamber in the politics house here, and they have a pretty competent website. So it's not that it's bad, but half a year ago at one point there was a new law here in the Netherlands, which was quite... |
**Jerod Santo:** \[12:19\] Okay. |
**Bert Hubert:** And luckily, the law was not so bad, but we only had a few days to look at it... And we knew that if it was bad, we would not have been able to do anything in those few days. So back then I said "We can never have this happen again." |
And on the Dutch parliamentary website you can put some search terms and it will send you messages if any new documents match those search terms. It's a bit clunky, it's not that great. So I thought let's make some kind of advanced warning monitor that we on the internet can put up searches and say "The moment you have... |
And actually, the sort of fun thing is if you are outside the government, you can innovate rather quickly. And the Dutch parliament is completely open data. So everything they do, you can effectively monitor the state of the parliamentary documentation system to your house, which I do. And that grew and grew and is now... |
**Jerod Santo:** Easier to read on your site than the official site. |
**Bert Hubert:** So I now have a few low-vision government workers that are actually relying on my site to do their job. And that has added to my sense of that is not just a hobby anymore, it's just that people actually need this stuff. So from that, I learned all these very interesting things that you only learn when ... |
One thing, for example, that I learned is that if you have an iPhone and someone enters a search term in your form, and you do that within quotes, because you want to search for a sentence, the iPhone will turn it into smart quotes. And that is not something your search engine is ready for. Your search engine doesn't r... |
And the other thing I learned - I have these signup emails, passwordless login email, so you can just log in with your email address, which is quite popular these days... And for some people it didn't work. And it turned out that Microsoft now runs a security scanner that will actually attempt to log in for you. |
**Jerod Santo:** We know this very well. We were just talking about this topic on the previous episode with somebody... But you have new information now, because we have the same thing, passwordless logins on our website. And what my trick to fix that was, was I switched the actual requests from a get to a post, but I ... |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah, they're posting it to your website. |
**Jerod Santo:** They're now posting. |
**Bert Hubert:** \[15:54\] And the weird thing is -- so the strange thing is they do the post, which is already, I think, violating many people's assumptions. You should not be posting on behalf of anyone else... But the other thing is, when they do that post, my site actually used to return a cookie, a session cookie,... |
**Jerod Santo:** Oh, cookie monsters. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Literally. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] |
**Bert Hubert:** These cookies are very valuable, because these are the session cookies that allow you to do stuff. Well, it now appears that the new barrier is they will execute your JavaScript, they will execute your posts, but they will not, for now, click on a button. So you must have a button in there right now, a... |
**Jerod Santo:** Okay. So you are actually -- you're adding a step for the real people, because now they have to click on the link in their email, and then come to your site, and then click on a button to sign in. |
**Bert Hubert:** Yeah. But Microsoft did not announce that they would be doing this, and they have also not announced that they're not going to click on buttons. So maybe one day they will click on buttons. |
**Jerod Santo:** \[laughs\] Well, you need a monitoring website where you can monitor Microsoft's changes... |
Subsets and Splits
No community queries yet
The top public SQL queries from the community will appear here once available.