oompahloompah | 9 years ago | on: I’ll never bring my phone on an international flight again. Neither should you
oompahloompah's comments
oompahloompah | 9 years ago | on: Left GitLab for GitHub after today's crash
This really applies to more than just code. Any time you rely on an outside provider you're opening up yourself to risks. Ultimately it comes down to whether or not you trust the ability of the provider to provide you with service more than you trust your own ability.
Really though, this situation is just re-hashing the fact that everyone has to be careful about single points of failure. If you're screwed because a single service provider you rely on is down you need to think about increasing redundancy. This goes for absolutely everything whether the service is for DNS, VPSes, or version control repositories.
oompahloompah | 9 years ago | on: Ask HN: We've all been there, what was your big stuff up?
I was working support at a VPS provider for my first real-world tech job fresh out of college and a customer was having issues with their system not booting correctly. They were smart enough to use our integrated backups service so I told them that they could delete their current disks and restore from backup. So they did...
Or at least they tried to.
The backups system was incredibly wobbly at the time and would corrupt its archives pretty frequently which is exactly what happened. They lost everything on that server.
Did I mention that was their sole server and they had no other backups?
It turned out that they were a company providing services to a government entity and had some pretty strict record-keeping requirements which they relied on our service to fulfill.
I was freaking out thinking I was going to be fired after being there for less than a year but everything was resolved fairly well (somehow).
I learned to never trust backups and the rule of thumb "two is one, one is none" as it applies to them.
page 1
Run an OS X VM and connect your phone to it. Run a full backup of the phone and then wipe your phone and transfer the VM to networked storage such as dropbox. Wipe the VM from your computer and then go on your flight, hand over your blank phone and computer (or load dummy data) and leave the airport. Download the VM and restore your phone.
You can also use this to secure work files from search and seizure by working from the VM at all times (though this naturally is inefficient and can be troublesome for some developers)