The Epic Ping Story

Because I tried the same thing again - I ran the admin tool and guess what? I got the same result. At this point, I became aware of the fact that every one of my co-workers in the building ALSO had their machines reboot. Twice. It seems I had forgotten to flip the switch on my network hub from "remote" to "local", so my datagrams were being sent everywhere on the network (XNS wasn't a switched network like IP or TCP). And it turns out there was a teeny tiny bug in the datagram parsing code which would cause a bluescreen whenever it received a particularly malformed packet. Guess what my admin tool was generating? Yup. I learned a valuable lesson that day. And I got to meet every single person who worked on the same floor as I because I went to every single one of them and personally apologized for ruining their day.

A Twitter thread recounts a programmer repeatedly testing an admin tool, accidentally rebooting every machine on the network because the hub was set to remote mode and malformed packets triggered blue screens. The punchline is that the admin tool was generating those malformed packets, forcing him to apologize personally to everyone on the floor. It is shared as a humorous story about debugging mistakes, catastrophic unintended consequences, and an epic network failure. EN: A Twitter thread recounts a programmer repeatedly testing an admin tool, accidentally rebooting every machine on the network because the hub was set to remote mode and malformed packets triggered blue screens. The punchline is that the admin tool was generating those malformed packets, forcing him to apologize personally to everyone on the floor. It is shared as a humorous story about debugging mistakes, catastrophic unintended consequences, and an epic network failure.

• @ithueti / 667 2019-03-04