Things I've learned throughout my 5 - 6 years as a programmer.
- StackOverflow is full of assholes.
- CMS's are for weaklings.
- The best feeling about waking up in the morning is figuring out how to solve that error in your code.
- You no longer think about normal people things. Your mind is full of code.
- You're practically a computer.
- ALWAYS backup and save your stuff or you WILL regret it. Enable autosave if possible.
- RIP your social life (if your friends don't know squat about programming)
- Darkness is better.
- Being a programmer is amazing.

The website i made has been hacked today.

Stored in their server.

They didnt give me an access for it.

The user account in the cms i used for updating content while building the website was revoked when the website is completed.

Now they ask me for the latest backup.

I have no backup because how the hell i do a backup when i got no access to the cpanel.

The only backup is the zip file for initial uploading into their server and the contents were added after the website is on their server.

That goddamn IT guy who wont give me any access for “securty sake” is calling me furiously asking for the backup and how to set up the stuffs from the beginning.

I thought he was the one who know his shit but i was wrong.

Fuck me?

No.

Fuck you.

But i still responding to him telling him step by step how to do shit with some swearing and sarcasm.

ALWAYS BACKUP YOUR SHITS, MATE

A real programmer finds backup always.

Fuck the memes.

Fuck the framework battles.

Fuck the language battles.

Fuck the titles.

Anybody who has been in this field long enough knows that it doesn't matter if your linus fucking torvalds, there is no human who has lived or ever will live that simultaneously understands, knows, and remembers how to implement, in multiple languages, the following:

- jest mocks for complex React components (partial mocks, full mocks, no mocks at all!)
- token cancellation for asynchronous Tasks in C#
- fullstack CRUD, REST, and websocket communication (throw in gRPC for bonus points)
- database query optimization, seeding, and design
- nginx routing, https redirection
- build automation with full test coverage and environment consideration
- docker container versioning, restoration, and cleanup
- internationalization on both the front AND backends
- secret storage, security audits
- package management, maintenence, and deprecation reviews
- integrating with dozens of APIs
- fucking how to center a div

and that's a _comically_ incomplete list; barely scratches the surface of the full range of what a dev can encounter in a given day of writing software

have many of us probably done one or even all of these at different times? surely.

but does that mean we are supposed to draw that up at a moment's notice some cookie-cutter solution like a fucking robot and spit out an answer on a fax sheet?

recruiters, if you read this site (perhaps only the good ones do anyway so its wasted oxygen), just know that whoever you hire its literally the luck of the draw of how well they perform during the interview. sure, perhaps some perform better, but you can never know how good someone is until they literally start working at your org, so... have fun with that.

Oh and I almost forgot, again for you recruiters, on top of that list which you probably won't ever understand for the entirety of your lives, you can also add writing documentation, backup scripts, and orchestrating / administrating fucking JIRA or actually any somewhat technical dashboard like a CMS or website, because once again, the devs are the only truly competent ones - and i don't even mean in a technical sense, i mean in a HUMAN sense of GETTING SHIT DONE IN GENERAL.

There's literally 2 types of people in the world: those who sit around drawing flow charts and talking on the phone all day, and those WHO LITERALLY FUCKING BUILD THE WORLD

why don't i just run the whole fucking company at this point? you guys are "celebrating" that you made literally $5 dollars from a single customer and i'm just sitting here coding 12 hours a day like all is fine and well

i'm so ANGRY its always the same no matter where i go, non-technical people have just no clue, even when you implore them how long things take, they just nod and smile and say "we'll do it the MVP way". sure, fine, you can do that like 2 or 3 times, but not for 6 fucking months until you have a stack of "MVPs" that come toppling down like the garbage they are.

How do expect to keep the "momentum" of your customers and sales (I hope you can hear the hatred of each of these market words as I type them) if the entire system is glued together with ducktape because YOU wanted to expedite the feature by doing it the EASY way instead of the RIGHT way. god, just forget it, nobody is going to listen anyway, its like the 5th time a row in my life

we NEED tests!
we NEED to know our code coverage!
we NEED to design our system to handle large amounts of traffic!
we NEED detailed logging!
we NEED to start building an exception database!

BILBO BAGGINS! I'm not trying to hurt you! I'm trying to help you!

Don't really know what this rant was, I'm just raging and all over the place at the universe. I'm going to bed.

TL;DR: disaster averted!

Story time!

About a year ago, the company I work for merged with another that offered complementary services. As is always the case, both companies had different ways of doing things, and that was true for the keeping of the financial records and history.

As the other company had a much larger financial database, after the merger we moved all the data of both companies on their software.

The said software is closed source, and was deployed on premises on a small server.

Even tho it has a lot of restrictions and missing features, it gets the job done and was stable enough for years.

But here comes the fun part: last week there was a power outage. We had no failsafe, no UPS, no recent backups and of course both the OS and the working database from the server broke.

Everyone was in panic mode, as our whole company needs the software for day to day activity!

Now, don't ask me how, but today we managed to recover all the data, got a new server with 2 RAID HDDs for the working copy of the DB, another pair for backups, and another machine with another dual HDD setup for secondary backups!

We still need a new UPS and another off site backup storage, but for now...disaster averted!

Time for a beer! Or 20...

That is all :)

I finally did it. I finally got rid of that client in a positive, respectful manner.

So basically, my dad has a freelance colleague. For a side project that person asked me to make him a website. My dad mentioned to said person that my sister's boyfriend does web design (he's trained to use autocad for designing the structure of furniture, nothing fancy just straight lines and upside down doors that fail after a while..

So my brother in law charged the guy 400 money for the design. I charged the guy 200 for the programming because my dad forced me to drop down my price to fit the budget because business relationship and he obviously couldn't let my sister's boyfriend not make more money than he deserves.

In the end after waiting on the design for weeks (I literally saw him do it in photoshop all in 2 layers on his laptop in half an hour) I had to rush the project because the due date was coming up. I already had most of it done but I had to redo a good part of the front-end to fit the design structure. I also had to re-do the design in photoshop to get the images and colors I needed, then cut it up into html. So realistically, my sister's boyfriend barely did anything.

Now the deal was that I'd develop the website and perform any updates/upgrades to it. I'd also host it on my webserver for a monthly fee. My sister's boyfriend was to handle any and all content related support.

At first it was all good, I only ever spoke with the guy when he needed a feature added and he paid me well for it. Overall the hit I took in initial development was paying off. As time went by, my sister's boyfriend started ignoring the guy's calls and the guy started calling me instead.

Now, he had this deal with my brother in law where he could charge his time at 35 money an hour. That's about 4 times minimum wage for not doing much.
Then I started to basically take over all support, but I was only allowed to charge 30 an hour. Pretty reasonable still and I wasn't too busy so it was all good.

As time went by I ended up getting asked to do more and more minimal changes. At some point I had done so many minimal changes I had to charge the guy about 2 hours extra that month and he went completely mental saying I can't just work for hours without telling him beforehand. We decided I had to discuss a price before any change. I charged my time on the phone with him twice after that and both times he bitched about me being expensive and once he even said he wanted to leave.

Now comes the fun part. A week ago he had an issue that was 100% support related. He tried calling my sister's boyfriend but the guy obviously didn't pick up. He called my dad about it, and my dad ended up calling my my sister's boyfriend. Now this guy is so slimy, he purposely didn't hang up the phone knowing my dad would use his cell and assume the other party would hang up because calls cost money. The guy heard my dad call my sister's boyfriend and heard him pick up immediately. He went completely mental saying how he wants both of us to always reply and call him back immediately.

This guy was always my lowest priority. He didn't really make me money and his calls and requests were annoying and unnecessary. Add to that that I specifically didn't want to handle support and was forced into it anyway, while all 'design' things (up to figuring out where and how to display a visitor counter) absolutely had to go to my sister's boyfriend..
But regardless of that, I generally replied to his emails within 10-20 minutes and rarely more than 25 hours.

My dad agreed (for us) that we now both had to reply to him within 24 hours. I was now stuck checking my voicemail every couple hours because my sister's boyfriend sucks at life.

During his rant he threatened to leave me, again. That was the point where I said fuck it.

For the past week I've been ignoring his calls. When he emails me I don't take more than 5 minutes replying. This morning I found an e-mail with 4 requests;

He wanted me to make a content-related change;
He wanted me to give him access to the site's Google analytics;
He wanted me to add a feature and write a guide on how to use it;
And fucking finally, he wanted a 'token to transfer his website'.

I promptly emailed him back saying I added his email a week ago and that he'd gotten an email from Google about it then, that I'd changed the content he wanted me to, a price for the last dev task and a token for his domain name, adding that its valid for 35 days and that his new host can contact me to receive a backup file of his website.

Sadly, I do have this on 10-minute dev job to do, but then I'm invoicing him all jobs I haven't invoiced yet and he can find another host willing to deal with his insanity.

The best part is I lose a webhosting client but I'm sure he'll still ask my sister's bitched parasitic boyfriend whenever he needs a photo resized and he'll still pay him 35 money for 2 minutes of work.

Fuck customers.

ALWAYS make a backup, or at least save your files every 5 minutes (or turn auto-save on).

You never know whether your parents will click the X button and clicking No in the save confirmation.

One Thursday noon,
operation manager: (looking at mobile)what the.....something is wrong i am getting bunch of emails about orders getting confirmed.
Colleague dev: (checks the main email where it gets all email sent/received) holy shit all of our clients getting confirmation email for orders which were already cancelled/incomplete.
Me: imediately contacting bluehost support, asking them to down the server so just that we can stopp it, 600+ emails were already sent and people keep getting it.
*calls head of IT* telling the situation because he's not in the office atm.

CEO: wtf is happening with my business, is it a hacker?

*so we have a intrusion somebody messed the site with a script or something*

All of us(dev) sits on the code finding the vulnerabilities , trying to track the issue that how somebody was able to do that.

*After an hour*

So we have gone through almost easch function written in the code which could possibly cause that but unable to find anything which could break it.

Head asking op when did you started getting it actually?
Op: right after 12 pm.

*an other hour passes*

Head: (checking the logs) so right after the last commit, site got updated too?. And....and.....wtf what da hell who wrote this shit in last commit?
* this fuckin query is missing damn where clause* 🤬

Me: me 😰

*long pause, everyone looking at me and i couldn't look at anyone*
The shame and me that how can i do that.

Head: so its you not any intrudor 😡
Further investigating, what the holy mother of #_/&;=568 why cronjob doesn't check how old the order is. Why why why.

(So basically this happened, because of that query all cancelled/incomplete orders got updated damage done already, helping it the cronjob running on all of them sending clients email and with that function some other values got updated too, inshort the whole db is fucked up.)
and now they know who did it as well.

*Head after some time cooling down, asked me the solution for the mess i create*

Me: i took backup just couple of days before i can restore that with a script and can do manual stuff for the recent 2 days. ( operation manager was already calling people and apologising from our side )

Head: okay do it now.

Me: *in panic* wrote a script to restore the records ( checking what i wrote 100000000 times now ), ran...tested...all working...restored the data.
after that wrote an apology email, because of me staff had to work alot and it becomes so hectic just because of me.

* at the end of the day CEO, head, staff accepted apology and asked me to be careful next time, so it actually teached me a lesson and i always always try to be more careful now especially with quries. People are really good here so that's how it goes* 🙂

Because of hardware failure we had to move some vpns from one datacenter to another.

The team of highly untrained monkeys at my hosting provider were hired to do this. First they ran backups of all the systems. Then they started the moving process. A few hours later they were done. We got an email everything was back online.

So we restarted all our processes and no data was coming in from our Raspberry's around the country. So we start a little investigation. What did these buffons do, they changed our rsa keys.

So we kindly ask them to put the old keys back so we do not have to fix 200 changed key warnings on systems that are not remotely accesible.

Apperently something that can't be done because their back up process is automated and always makes new keys.

Holy fucking fuck, whats the point in having a backup its not an exact copy. Is this fucking normal?

Now I will be spending the next few weeks literally standing in cow shit reconnecting Raspberry's.

Thanks a fucking lot. Not!

Fucking cloud providers always trying to steal your shit and spy on your things, fucking prying eyes. That's why i've decided to go back hosting my own private cloud from home. Running on some very energy efficient shit: dual core intel atom cpu (so slow that it can't fucking run windows normally), 16gb of ram, because why the fuck not? and 1tb 2.5"hdd, along with unlimited data - 100/100 Mbit/s internet connection with a server response time less than 95ms just to backup my shitty Iphone selfies and cat pics, host some very important files and regularly back up my contacts. This shit runs CentOS, Nginx, https, bitch! This platform is more trustworthy than your shitty dropbox or whatever other shit they offer you. I can choose whether i back-up my shit from local network or over internetz, Costing me no more than 25€ annually(just to keep the machine on 24/7/365).

Always check if the DB backup you made works.

Never hack a game and change the gold value to 1.0e307.... It takes so long for my CPU to update its value whenever it changes......

This game is over 😢😥

Also always remember to take a backup before making dumb hacks....

I had just started as an SDE intern, and was fiddling around with the code base.

Me: Hey, can you send me the link to our version control system?
Mentor: Umm, what!?
Me: You know, where we keep our code backup...
Mentor: Hmm, is there a need for that?
Me: Yeah, I mean, my past experience tells me to always backup code, just in case something goes wrong.
Mentor: Ohh, that's easy. I'll teach you how I do it.

So, he comes to my workplace, and does this:
1. Go to your workspace folder.
2. Right click it.
3. Zip it.
4. Open outlook.
5. Compose email.
6. Attach the zip file.
7. Mail to yourself.
8. That's how it's done!

I was like what the hell!?!?! Is this really happening?? And then he started basking in his glory, as if he had taught me some secret hack! Seeing this, I couldn't even get myself to introduce him to git. That was the worst part.

Always backup your code. UPS failed :(

My Sunday Morning until afternoon. FML. So I was experiencing nightly reboots of my home server for three days now. Always at 3:12am strange thing. Sunday morning (10am ca) I thought I'd investigate because the reboots affected my backups as well. All the logs and the security mails said was that some processes received signal 11. Strange. Checked the periodics tasks and executed every task manually. Nothing special. Strange. Checked smart status for all disks. Two disks where having CRC errors. Not many but a couple. Oh well. Changing sata cables again 🙄. But those CRC errors cannot be the reason for the reboots at precisely the same time each night. I noticed that all my zpools got scrubbed except my root-pool which hasn't been scrubbed since the error first occured. Well, let's do it by hand: zpool scrub zroot....Freeze. dafuq. Walked over to the server and resetted. Waited 10 minutes. System not up yet. Fuuu...that was when I first guessed that Sunday won't be that sunny after all. Connected monitor. Reset. Black screen?!?! Disconnected all disks aso. Reset. Black screen. Oh c'moooon! CMOS reset. Black screen. Sigh. CMOS reset with a 5 minute battery removal. And new sata cable just in cable. Yes, boots again. Mood lightened... Now the system segfaults when importing zroot. Good damnit. Pulled out the FreeBSD bootstick. zpool import -R /tmp zroot...segfault. reboot. Read-only zroot import. Manually triggering checksum test with the zdb command. "Invalid blckptr type". Deep breath now. Destroyed pool, recreated it. Zfs send/recv from backup. Some more config. Reboot. Boots yeah ... Doesn't find files??? Reboot. Other error? Undefined symbols???? Now I need another coffee. Maybe I did something wrong during recovery? Not very likely but let's do it again...recover-recover. different but same horrible errors. What in the name...? Pulled out a really old disk. Put it in, boots fine. So it must be the disks. Walked around the house and searched for some new disks for a new 2 disk zfs root mirror to replace the obviously broken disks. Found some new ones even. Recovery boot, minimal FreeBSD Install for bootloader aso. Deleted and recreated zroot, zfs send/recv from backup. Set bootfs attribute, reboot........
It works again. Fuckit, now it is 6pm, I still haven't showered. Put both disks through extensive tests and checked every single block. These disks aren't faulty. But for some reason they froze my system in a way so that I had to reset my BIOS and they had really low level data errors....? I Wonder if those disks have a firmware problem? So that was most of my Sunday. Nice, isn't it? But hey: calm sea won't make a good sailor, right?

The website of the italian post service is "closed" between 23:45 and 00:15, everyday.
I don't know if something like this happens in other countries...

And do you know when I really need to access it?
ALWAYS IN THESE 30 MINUTES, not the others 1.410 of the day!

P.S.
What do you think, what could be a valid reason to "close" a web service?
I thought about backup, but other services don't have this problem.

Remember to always implement a backup solution if the first one fails.
Don’t break the experience for the user. 😉

Why you should always backup.

Nearly a year ago I developed a whole project (iOS, tvOS, watchOS), but I never backed it up because I had a recent machine and thought the chance that something happens to the disk is so small I didn’t backup. But then my mac didn’t start correctly. So I needed to reset it. Lose the project, some other files but not much else. Then I recoded the project and backed it up on multiple places. But a little later, I was writing another app, again didn’t copy again... This time I deleted the wrong folder and deleted the trash, was gone too. So from then I learned to copy everything I coded. All projects I work on, I keep a copy of on an external disk, GitHub and Bitbucket. Assuming they wont crash all at the same time 😉.

So I recommend everyone to backup all your code. Even if it’s only 500 lines. Losing it is hard...

So, a few months back my mother had some issues with her windows 10 box not being able to do proper backups to a backup partition. At the same time I was pulling insane hours at work and writing on a eBook on commission for a guy, besides having small kids with on and off flu and shit.

Needless to say, I didn't have time to look at the backup issues. Well, even though my mom is one of those dogs you can't teach new tricks, she has always been resourceful enough to get help with things.

This time she picked up the phone and called Microsoft Support, got some guys to remote in and take a look. They messed around a bit and said they were done.

She phoned me up later that day to tell me how proud she was of herself for doing that. Of course, she skipped telling me the important bit about she actually calling them, rather describing it as "Microsoft was just on my computer and fixed it".

You can imagine my immediate reaction, cold sweat running down my back, adrenalin rushing in as I dug through the details of what had happened.

A few days later she calls me up again and tells me the problem is back, and we agree that even though the MS dudes was not able to fix it at first, she should try again, as she had a ticket to reference.

The next attempt by MS actually fried her partitions, and apparently they had f-ed up trying to delete and recreate the backup partition.

That's not the worst of it though. Since they fried her disk, her computer crashed and naturally the remoting won't work. In our country, they have no people on the ground to do hands on help, and they didn't have a partner near by. Her not having a win 10 usb stick, nor a spare computer to make one, she was in a surreal predicament.

She was also quite pissed, and pissed off mums are not to be messed with. She managed to get Microsoft to agree to cover the costs of a non-partner to visit her to fix the problems, and using her as the middle man, they made an agreement with the 3rd-party tech support company.

After the box was fixed though, some more issues arose... regarding billing. The 3rd-party tech support was unable to get in contact with the person at MS that was going to sign off on the bill, and again using my mom as the middle man, it was agreed that my mom, as the customer, was to be reimbursed for the bill to the 3rd-party.

Guess what... 3 months went by, with weekly follow-ups and nagging from my mom, and still no money...

At this time, I had time to help her, and after some digging and borderline stalking, we managed to get the phone numbers of some of the higher ups in my country, and she started calling them directly.

After talking to a couple who refused to help, she reached the Vice President of the country branch, and was finally able to talk to someone who gave a shit.

Still took over a month more to actually get the money, but now she had someone who actually gave her statuses, receipts and ETAs.

FUCK!

Always have a backup or make sure the cloud you work in is making one!

Boss wanted me to make changes in company's website which was based on wordpres s.

I knew it could be done by tweaking some JS code, but I have very less experience with wordpress

But wordpress is easy man(Internet told me).

Give me 5 minutes, you will see the changes in production.
Being lazy af I directly logged in to ftp, checked out some files, updated some code, I was good to go.

Before pushing it, I opened the website and it was GONE ٩(๑´0`๑)۶

Now there was no public_html in the root.
I was fucked. I have accidentally deleted the website that had no backup.

And the best part I was on leave from
next day.

I was looking everywhere for backups, looked into google cache to get the contents. I have to recreate the complete site now.

Just when I was asking questions on choice of my profession and simultaneously looking here and there in FTP for backups,
I found the jewel "public_html".

It happens out that I have accidentally moved the folder to some other directory.

Phewww.

Moved it back to root. Site was up and running.

Reassured myself that I deserve to be a dev.

Backed up complete site, made the changes.

Uploaded it.

And the best part, amount of wordpress I learned in those three hours was way more than I could have learnt in many weeks.

Lessons Learnt :

A) ALWAYS keep backups.
B) You SHOULD NOT make changes on prod directly
C) You become superhuman when your brain know you are going to be fucked 😂

Hello DevRant community! It’s been a while, almost 5 years to be exact. The last time I posted here, I was a newbie, grappling with the challenges of a new job in a completely new country. Oh, how time flies!

Fast forward to today, and it’s been quite the journey. The codebase that once seemed like an indecipherable maze is now my playground. The bugs that used to keep me up at night are now my morning coffee puzzles. And the team, oh the team! We’ve moved from awkward nods to inside jokes and shared victories.

But let’s talk about the real hero here - the coffee machine. The unsung hero that has fueled late-night coding sessions and early morning stand-ups. It’s seen more heated debates than the PR comments section. If only it could talk, it would probably write its own rant about the indecisiveness of developers choosing between cappuccino and latte.

And then there are the unforgettable ‘learning opportunities’ - moments like accidentally shutting down the production server or dropping the customer database. Yes, they were panic-inducing crises of apocalyptic proportions at that time, but in hindsight, they were valuable lessons. Lessons about the importance of thorough testing, proper version control, reliable backup systems, and most importantly, owning up to our mistakes.

So here’s to the victories and failures, the bugs and fixes, the refactorings and 'wontfix’s. Here’s to the incredible journey of growth and learning. And most importantly, here’s to this amazing community that’s always been there with advice, sympathy, humor, and support.

Can’t wait to see what the next 5 years bring! 🥂

1. Always have a backup
2. Don't be afraid to fail

Failing is one of the best ways to get better at our craft. Fear is a healthy response to a challenge, but don't let it control you. Go for it. Things will break and that's okay because you have a backup or a way to undo the change. Learn from the mistake and perfect your craft.

A friend has a small business and asked me if I could make him a small program. So why not, experience for me and I can help a friend out. (This started in ~mid 2016)

Started out as a WPF desktop application with many weird bugs and slow interface, into crashing the database on AWS (could not connect, could not get a backup). It was just hell and I kind of gave up on fixing it.

I always talked to him and said "yeah, I will do something better soon", but I was procrastinating and kept pushing it away from me. Then one day I said "f*ck it - lets go" and started coding on 2.0:

- WebApp with a complete new architecture (which I learned in the past few months)
- User authentication (JWT)
- ASP.NET Core Backend for web api
- Angular 4 Frontend w/ bootstrap
- Coded in like a week with 3-5 hours each day

Deployed around 6 months ago and he never had a complain. When I visited him I asked "how is your application doing?" - "great. it just works!".

My once most hated project turned into the most successful project in just a few months.

Me and my friend were having a coffee in a coffee shop and then she told me the story of how she got fired.
So back then storing data on cloud was not that convenient and employees in her company used to carry softwares and other stuff in pendrives.
This one day after completing a MAJOR project for a very irritating client, my friend and her team decided to take the day off and celebrate this victory in a pub.
She got drunk and then came the call of her boss saying that they needed to showcase the software right then to the client.

Being always responsible and committed to her work my friend had decided to keep a backup in her pendrive which she kept in her breast pocket of her shirt.

So she goes into the washroom to freshen up, bends down near the toilet to vomit out liquor and lo!

The pendrive slid all the way down from her pocket into the toilet sink.
She didn't notice and flushed and down went the whole project into the sewer.

Moral - life fucks you in ridiculous ways.

Ps. She left her laptop at her home which was very far from her office and the pub. The team had to go to her home first to retain the project and eventually got seriously late. Boss didn't like it as the client was a real pain in the ass and this was a big project too and being the team lead my friend was supposed to deliver as expected.
She got fired.

Quick Tutorial: How to find a missing bug.

0) Wake up & have breakfast
1) Goto work
2) Do your job until the end of the working day
3) Make a backup
4) Shutdown your PC
5) Stand up
6) Go to the office door
7) Grab the door
8) Now the phone rings
9) Turn and go back
10) Take the phone
11) Now you get the bug report

This is a well approved method.
It always works!

A while ago I stumbled upon this cheap vps provider called dedistation (lowest was $15/year), so I end up buying a one year subscription and transferred all of my personal sites to it. Fast forward six month later, uptime robot notified me that my vps is down. No problem, I'll just submit a ticket. Few days go by and I yet to receive a response. Not a problem, I'll just try and login via the serial interface and get my shit, no luck there either.
Seems like these motherfuckers just packed up and went offline without a shit given.
No response, no notification untill today! How more twat a company could be?
Lessons learned the hard way
- always backup regularly
- check and transfer nameserver or no emails for days.
- you get what u pay for (haven't learned this fully yet. Went again with a cheap legit-ish provider (arubacloud)

This was about two years ago, and is so fucking simple. But it's because I fucked up something so goddamn simple that I'll never be able to forget.

One of the stupidest fucking things I've done?

Went into the GNOME Disks utility trying to wipe a SanDisk Cruzer USB drive. BAM! There goes the entirety of my /dev/sda disk! Oh, and you know all partitions on that disk?? Gone!! Nothing I could do.

I don't know which pisses me off about myself more: The fact that Linux has more complicated tools that do the same exact job but make me think about what the actual fuck I'm doing thus preventing fuckups, or the fact that I was too fucking lazy to use them and decided to go with the dirt simple option and still managed to fuck myself over in the end...

Lesson for you kids that haven't fucked yourselves over in a way this dumb yet: ALWAYS have that backup installer USB somewhere. ALWAYS.

!rant

I've always been kinda lazy about backups and such, thinking it wouldn't be so bad, and "I have my most important stuff on Dropbox".

Just now, for some reason one of my hard drives just stopped for a bit, and I couldn't do anything with it anymore. Luckily it went away after restarting my pc, but it scared the shit out of me, as I almost lost 500 gigs worth of music, films, documents, etc...

This made me really think about the whole backup thing, and I'm creating a disk image as I type this. The time that I spend on that will be much less then the time it'll cost to recover everything. Lesson learned ^^'

there is always a backup plan..☺️

Because I am very interested in cyber security and plan on doing my masters in it security I always try to stay up to date with the latest news and tools. However sometimes its a good idea to ask similar-minded people on how they approach these things, - and maybe I can learn a couple of things. So maybe people like @linuxxx have some advice :D Let's discuss :D

1) What's your goto OS? I currently use Antergos x64 and a Win10 Dualboot. Most likely you guys will recommend Linux, but if so what ditro, and why? I know that people like Snowden use QubesOS. What makes it much better then other distro? Would you use it for everyday tasks or is it overkill? What about Kali or Parrot-OS?

2) Your go-to privacy/security tools? Personally, I am always conencted to a VPN with openvpn (Killswitch on). In my browser (Firefox) I use UBlock and HttpsEverywhere. Used NoScript for a while but had more trouble then actual use with it (blocked too much). Search engine is DDG. All of my data is stored in VeraCrypt containers, so even if the system is compromised nobody is able to access any private data. Passwords are stored in KeePass. What other tools would you recommend?

3) What websites are you browsing for competent news reports in the it security scene? What websites can you recommend to find academic writeups/white papers about certain topics?

4) Google. Yeah a hate-love relationship, but its hard to completely avoid it. I do actually have a Google-Home device (dont kill me), which I use for calender entries, timers, alarms, reminders, and weather updates as well as IOT stuff such as turning my LED lights on and off. I wouldn"t mind switching to an open source solution which is equally good, however so far I couldnt find anything that would a good option. Suggestions?

5) What actions do you take to secure your phone and prevent things such as being tracked/spyed? Personally so far I havent really done much except for installing AdAway on my rooted device aswell as the same Firefox plugins I use on my desktop PC.

6) Are there ways to create mirror images of my entire linux system? Every now and then stuff breaks, that is tedious to fix and reinstalling the system takes a couple of hours. I remember from Windows that software such as Acronis or Paragon can create a full image of your system that you can backup and restore at any point to get a stable, healthy system back (without the need to install everything by hand).

7) Would you encrypt the boot partition of your system, even tho all data is already stored in encrypted containers?

8) Any other advice you can give :P ?

Google and Stack Overflow are your best friends. Always backup. Don't drop databases accidentally.

We've got a big legacy app which we have to rewrite. The current client applications are only working on XP(!). We have to move the clients to the browser so we can finally get rid of all XP vm-s. The db schema is complex but still 1000+ stored procedures and functions and about a hundred tables with 13 years of data.
So I ask the guy responsible for maintaining the DB code. (he is ~25 years older than me)

me - Where is the source of the database. Which project?
he - Where would it be? It's in the db.
me - So we've got a huge db without VCS, upgrade/downgrade scripts, etc?
he - Yes. I don't get why young developers always want to use shiny new tech like git just because it is cool. It has nothing that an external usb backup drive can't do.
me - VCS has been around since the early 1980's...
he - If you really want, you can put it under git or whatever, so you can sleep better, but I still think it is stupid and a waste of time.

I get that it's hard to keep up, but getting personal...

A story from the old days

My father had a fame around he's friends that he understood this nasty business that is computers and in the pre-windows time he was reasonably knowledgeable... But as things evolved he didn't evolve with them so when he's friends asked him to help he would take me to solve the problem...

One day he asked me to see what was the problem with a friend's personal computer. This is a 70+ year old man.

When I get to his computer I do a quick check and see it's too infected with so many viruses to the point it is better to just format and clean install, so I ask him to backup he's files and the next day I picked up the PC and clean installed and setup the all thing...

Not more than 3 months pass and the guy says to my dad the problem was back...

I get there and the antivirus was turned off and the PC was infected... Found it weird but okay, enabled the antivirus, cleaned everything... Back to as new.... This time I instructed him to keep the antivirus always updated and running...

One week later to my surprise: he reports it is all back... Now I am getting tired of this and went to he's browsing history to find out how the hell he is achieving this... Too my surprise the amount of early internet shady porn sites was over the top...

I know had to tell a 70+ year old man how to safely watch porn... But that is not my problem, so I ask him what kind of sites he's going to... He blames he's grandson for using the internet in he's computer... Only problem: he's grandson is 2 years old...

I just set up the bookmarks with some children sites and convinced my father to take a look at that and either instruct the man or the kid on how to watch porn without getting a venereal disease...

Having gone to a bank to reset a password again today (Yes, I forgot it for like... 3rd time, don't judge me, its my backup bank account I need to access like... once a year), I was once again made to think - I come in, give them my state ID by which they authorize that I can even make a password reset request.

Then they give me a tablet to... sign a contract addendum?

Its not the contract part that always makes me stop and think though - its the "sign" part.

I'd wager that I am not the only one who only ever uses a computer to write text these days. So... My handwriting got a lot jerkier, less dependable. Soooo... My signature can be wildly different each time.......

And if my signature varies a lot... then... what is the point of having it on a piece of paper?

I know its just a legal measure of some sort... And that, if it came down to someone impersonating me and I'd go to court with the bank, there would be specialists who can tell if a signature was forged or not... But...

Come on, the computer world has so much more reliable, uncrackable, unforgable solutions already... Why... Don't all folks of the modern world already have some sort of... state-assigned private/public keypairs that could be used to sign official documents instead?

It costs money, takes time to develop etc... But... Then, there would not only be no need to sign papers anymore... And it would be incredibly hard to forge.

The key could even be encrypted, so the person wishing to sign something would have to know a PIN code or a password or something...

tl;dr: I hate physical signatures as a method of authentication / authorization. I wish the modern world would use PKI cryptography instead...

This is also why you should always take a backup:

client.ExecuteNonQuery($"delete from {CategoryTable} where category_id-{id}");

- working on a personal project
- got angry at windows for sucking so bad at running fucking vs code of all things
- banged the palm rest on laptop in rage
- windows freezes
- restart
- harddisk died
- lost my collection of notes from college
- lost all my photos
- but most importantly, lost my progress on a project that I was working on and hadn't git push
- FANTASTIC

Lession learned. Always have a backup. ALWAYS.

My phone got stuck in funky restart boot loop yesterday. The first 2 restarts was odd but after 3 cycles, I started panicking. Went on my PC, googled for all kinds of button combinations of power button, volume button, back button, and home button to get into fastboot, recovery and safe mode to see if I can clear stuff or at least get backup of my stuff. I also tried taking the battery out. Nothing works, except when I factory reset.

Everything was new again and as it booted up, I have to remember to change my authentication keys in LastPass, my private ssh key in Krypt. But fortunately, Google remembered all my apps and suggested if I wanted to install them again since it recognized my phone was an old phone. Thanks for tracking me Google. And now since its a reset, everything is clean, no cache, cookie, and some of my music files are all gone. Well at least its fast like before.

So, I decided over the weekend that I would move my entire dev environment to Linux. No Windows on the laptop and only as a backup boot system for my home PC. I wanted to wean myself off of Linux as only being a VM and move to the full blown desktop.

I can only describe my experience to that of having your first kid: lot's of crying and joy at the same time.

Things I've learned:
1. The install is amazingly painless. Wi-Fi and Bluetooth work straight out of the box no configuring needed.
2. OH MY GOD THE CUSTOMIZATION. Rocking Arc Dark theme on Gnome3 = EVERYTHING IS
ALWAYS DARK MICROSOFT WHY IS THIS NOT A THING.
3. Getting Java servlets to work has been hell. I gave up trying to get them to work in eclipse and moved over to IntelliJ. More trial and error before I can figure out why tomcat won't fucking work in eclipse but it's fine in IntelliJ.
4. The UI and overall work flow has been improved after getting past the learning curve. Gnome3 is way better from when I tried it out 4 years ago.
5. Vim has a steep learning curve but I am starting to understand the net benefits of it. It'll probably be a solid month before I get good with it.
6. Loosing Microsoft Office has been a little bit of a challenge but their suite is online so....meh. I do miss Visual Studio though, and am still looking for an adequate replacement for C++ and C# development.

Overall it's been a challenge but I think it's been a net gain. Now if only I could get the whole sys-admin team to use it. ;)

Git tip: Before doing "git clean -fd" always think twice and backup the whole folder manually before doing that. Take it from me.
Also be careful with, "git pull" 😩

I had a problem with too many backups from our personal data (Photos,videos etc.)
Always I had 1-2 hard drives to backup all important files every time.
Too many duplicates!!

So I created a batch file that for every image-video file type in my backup , will move only one in a new folder, sorted by daytime taken and in a folder of that year, then it renamed all with the datetime of the file.

Now I have a great backup sorted by year in folders since 2003. Just saved me from 2 terabyte duplicates and I have now 600gb sorted backup files!

I was working for a project with one of the project managers. Despite several discussions, he was not ready to have provisioned for procurement of couple of extra drives for database backups. Also because it's always how they worked, developers were allowed to make changes to the production databases directly.

Since I knew it was going to be burning some day, despite his negligence, I ran a script to take full database backups every night, compress, and remove old backups all to do in the drives we had on server. Sat it automated using scheduler.

One day it happened that one of the junior developers deleted one major table taking whole production down. Next thing you know everyone went crazy. Since I felt bad for the managers and users, I was able to restore database using backup from last night.

You know who jumped in first before senior management to take credit of all this and got some nice kudos..that project manager. Also, you know who got burned..it would not be a rant if I did not got schooled for not following on the wisdom of project manager.

Anyways, we are still not taking database backups (as per project manager)

Transferred a lot of important files in between PC with a 32 GB thumbdrive. One time, when I needed it the most, it couldn't read. It had the original up-to-date information on everything. Backup files were old and found in either emails, in another PC somewhere else and on an ex-colleagues laptop that, due to poor office management, lost track of where that laptop is.

<<prev. #wk235 advices>>

~ Study the Error log deeply, Google each line if needed. Don't give up.
~ Learn by doing. Don't just read/watch.
~ Practice breaking down the problem statement first in different components and hierarchies. Don't jump into coding right away.
~ Write some, review some. Don't put off review for later.
~ Even if you don't exactly follow the best security practices - always ensure that your program is safe for use. Especially for user-inputs, etc, pay attention.
~ Never distribute code with passwords/keys written in it.
~ Don't hard code stuff, use Config file, environment variables, etc.
~ Try to automate repetitive stuff like build and deploy etc
~ Save and backup you code.
~ No one knows everything, also, today's knowledge gets outdated tomorrow. Continuous learning is synonymous with this field.

<<next #wk235 advices>>

2 AIX workloads got messed up during patching. Apparently they had a local database and they were in PROD env.

"Not a biggie - there's always a netbackup to restore the whole workload" - I said and reached out to netbackup folks.

Turns out even though netbackup was configured properly it had never even initiated successfully bcz backup NIC was not whitelisted in network layer. Never ever in 3 years.

Service guys were piiiiiiiiiiiiised big time

Fun story:

I once was in some kind of SSH-ception, my machine and two remote machines where the same, as in the username and hostname (local name) where equal. All with and Hitachi 500 GB disk.

I was going to nuke the remote machine 1, so later that day I would rebuild the system and all that good stuff, so it would be equal to remote machine 2.

I check the disks and see that it is what I expected, and proceed with the so called "sudo rm -rf /".

Turns out, in my madness, I was doing this on the remote machine 2, not on remote machine 1 (too many terminals), and after I pressed the button and 5 minutes are passed, I realize my mistake...I had just killed a big part of some research I was doing for college (100 or so simulation files, 2GB each).

LESSON: Always triple check your drives and sessions.

P.S.: Something similar happened with me once doing dd to make a ubuntu bootable flash, I ended up erasing 800GB of backup files.

Always backup your data..

Back in 2005, I had quite a few bits of music I was working on (just as a hobby). A lot of these had not been finished, but I'd sent excerpts in medium-quality MP3 format to a friend. I had an external backup drive - a regular hard drive in an USB enclosure. After a while, this drive started making unpleasant whining sounds so I sent it off for replacement.

During that time I made the foolish decision to try and plug a floppy drive in while the PC was powered on. Something touched the bottom of the hard drive and the power went off. I powered it back on again and heard a fizzing sound, there were some flashes from the hard drive and a burning smell. Yep, the disk was dead - and my backup drive was gone.

I'm still not entirely sure what happened, my best guess is that I had an exposed piece of wire from one of my hacky case mods (I had a thing for blue LEDs) which touched the circuitry of the hard drive. Almost every project, piece of software I'd created, every photo I'd taken, and most unfinished music I'd made up until that point - gone. I was pretty devastated about it. I only had a handful of things survived which I'd burned onto CD previously.

I managed to get some excerpts back from my friend, and re-created my favourite pieces of music based on those. I've moved on to other projects and write much better code now, so mostly I am no longer bothered. I do wish I could re-listen to some of the music I had made back then though.

Needless to say, I no longer fiddle around with the innards of my computers while they are on, store everything on mirrored drives and also ensure I always have a backup somewhere (and am working on remote backups and having several days of backups...)

I never want that to happen again

Risk is part of my everyday life.

I take the risk everyday when opening IDE and changing line of code that can either break database or crash other systems that are depending on one I am developing. ( not instantly but in some time in the future )

So....

Many years ago I was updating some application server production code while being drunk.
Everything went fine except me waking up in the morning and didn’t remember how I did it.

... what I learned from my developers life except that heavy drinking and updating servers is not the best idea ?

First, don’t give a fuck, do your job and ask questions even if the person in front of you said that understood everything and you think you understood all of shit.
Second, if you think you know what to do think twice.
Third, having any backup, any tests and any documentation is always better then having nothing.

And the most important.
The most risky in every business are people around you, so always have good people around and there would be no risk at all or you won’t even think about it.

✌🏽 ❤️

Ok, I need to vent a little bit about myself. Just got back from my 2 weeks vacations. Met with everyone, caught up on everything that has happened, booted my lap top and tried to ssh into the servers to see log files if anything out of the ordinary has happened.

Well, I was having "Permission denied (publickey)." . Well fuck. Tried on other servers and same thing.

I got panicked, thinking how the fuck did we get hacked? The ssh key is only on my laptop, and an encrypted backup exists only in Bitwarden account. If yes, why are the systems intact and working well? Kept scratching my head for hours. Well, I was trying to log in with user "root" instead of "admin". I always mistake these two names. Rusty brain ._.

!rant, but let me tell you this

I wanted to automate some tasks in work, because it started to be a pain in the ass, manually copying those assets took me between 30 - 50 min

let me see, I always wanted to check out python so I started to copy paste some code together, editing it and after a few hours all I know I have a tool which logs in to our work CMS download and unpacks a zip archive, creates a backup from the old files in the repository and moves the files I just downloaded in the repo, I put this in a loop for our twenty languages (websites) and its done

Im amazed, I never picked up a language this easy to use

Always have a backup and never edit code directly on production.

Why am I so curious?

You are always talking about Arch linux. Well, I got a second hand (very old) laptop to use as a backup, as I am going to working from home and I just have a desktop pc. So I decided to install Arch on it just to know how does it works. After this first experience, I would change it to a lubuntu (I am talking about a Celeron with 2GB RAM).

Well... I managed to install Arch. It is up and running. Lot's of problems to fix yet, sound, native wifi (I am using a wifi adapter that just works on any linux distro) etc but I am fucking in love with Arch! And I can't use it to work, as it is very unstable and I really need everything always up and running to work. I cannot have any glitch with the computer or I can lose a deadline.

Had a Nas with a single 3tb seagate HDD in it.
It ran well for half a year and it was my main backup and a time machine for my dad.

The time came that my budget was allowing a second drive for redundancy so I powered it off, added the second drive and powered it back on.

😐😓😧😭

The drive did indeed die and yes, it was one of those drives with an extremely high failure rate.

My dad was pretty mad that his backups were gone even though he didn't need them.

So my biggest lesson from this was to always encrypt such drives because dads backup wasn't and my files and such weren't either, so someone could restore our hole life's from the drive.
So I can't Rma that fucker.
Zfs at rest encryption ftw!

By the way, writing this I noticed that I didn't need to power the Nas down to add the second drive....
Ffffffffuuuuuuuuucccckkkkkk.

Another more recent thing was a refurb 4tb we red that I bought used for a bargain.
It reported 2 unwritable sectors but I didn't care for the money.

After about a month, it died.
The interesting part is how it died.
It spinns up, gets detected, you can access the data.
You can copy the data.

But after a few moments of continues load, all operations start timing out and the drive either disconnects completely or the zpool degrades and shuts down.

In the first case, replugging brings the drive back untill it does it again.

On zpool degradation only a reboot brings it back.

Put a fan on it in case it was overheating but that didn't fix it.

Opened my beloved laptop after a week of sickness.

ACPI error...

Spent the evening taking a backup from initramfs. Then installing Ubuntu 17.10

Now, I love me some penguin but that shit gets too crazy too often.

Not that I didn't enjoy spending the day setting up the system, there is some stability I always miss from a Win/Mac environment

!rant
What I tell every Admin Padawan and I hope it will help you, too...

---
Whatever you do on any system, always make sure you know and are able to revert your changes so you can return to the last working system state.
---

It is basically somewhat similar to "always have a backup". But it goes much further in my opinion because it also implies that you know for certain that a recovery works as well since:

"Nobody wants backup, everybody wants recovery"

Whats the fucking purpose of our companys dev test and prod env. Dev always only has a single instance. Sometimes clustered services run as cluster on test. Producing headaches because the clustering behaviour couldnt be seen on a single instance and Prod lacks all the nice deployment tools off dev/test. Fuck thinking you could dev then test and prod without any major reconfiguration and headaches. And all because the Storage costs is RETARDEDLY expensive because the backup EVERYTHING with ridiculess overkill. That results in headaches when requesting new servers. Took an old Workstation from the shelves and made it my vm slave so at least i could reliably deploy to test.. Fuck this process

External Storage recommendation questions.

Im in need of some sort of external storage, either a harddrive or a NAS server, but idk what to get.

Price should be reasonable for the security and storage space it gives, so heres what i figured so far for pros and cons:

NAS Server:
+ Bigger capacity
+ Raid option
+ Easily expandable
+ Always accessible via the network (local)

- Difficult to transport (not gonna do that, but still)
- Expensive
- Physically larger
- Consumes power 24/7 (i dont pay for power currently)

Harddrive:
+ Easy to pack away and transport
+ Cheaper

- If drive fails, youre fucked
- If you want larger capacity, you end up with two external backups

What do you guys do? Im not sure what i should do :i
Any advice is appreciated.

It will be used for external backup, as mentioned. For my server and my own pc.

I think I have configuphobia.

When you need to setup configurations for like anything, it's always super loosely coupled and can break when you even breathe on it.

Database table columns? Configured once.
Authorization management? Create a user and configure the password and username in the application.
Backups? Configure the network path to backup to.

All these things are so EASY to break!
Maybe I'm overcautious, but I really dislike it.

There are ways around it of course, like documentation and automation, but it's all so much work. And even then it's still loosely coupled.

What do you all do to keep your configs working without getting nightmares?

Be me, a ret***

Already 3 months in a new position. (check my previous rant)
Storm have passed for a while but another storm is brewing.

C levels are having disagreement with each other.
Caught in the crossfire as one the of C's hire.
Have some chit chats with both side of C, each telling different stories.

C#1 told me there was a demand from C#2 to force tech guys (not defined who or how many) to resigns.

C#2 told me there is no plan to close the whole tech team. But there's a distrust brewing in the tech team especially on the C#1

Be me, C#1 hire...
Me telling them IDK what their real intentions are but there's a high probability for my reputation to be tarnished on the job Market.

I've always had good review amongst peers and confident I did and do a satisfactory job for my previous employer.

Be me:
Resorted to flexing my connection to high ranking (think of C suites) reference who I've worked and have good relations with.
Connected them to my C#2.
Dunno how the C#2 thinks of me and what my value to C#2 are.

Don't know what the future hold for me.
Tried doing one interview but topics of my reputation comes up because of me jumping to executive position without having "Manager" ever in my resume.
Got a bit too defensive on that and it might eff up my chance to have a backup ready in case I urgently need to jump ship.

Depression and impostor syndrome hits like a truck every day.

My late 2015 iMac won’t get past the progress bar on the startup. I’ve tried every combo keypress/restart procedure I can dig up in multiple Google searches. Starting to get worried I’ll have to completely wipe and reinstall. Online Apple support is not helpful. Genius Bar in my area is not taking appointments still due to COVID. And money is always too tight to buy anything other than another used Mac. Anyone got a surefire way to get back to a login screen? At least to ensure my backup is up-to-date before I wipe it and start over?