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Comment by acheron | Hacker News Reader

I figured HN probably ran on an old desktop tower under somebody's desk, with a post-it note on it that says "DO NOT REBOOT!!!!"

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In fact, restarting the server is or was the only way to fix at least one bug on HN.[1] Pretty sure I've seen it as late as last year, and dang confirmed the fix was still the same.

(I know, restarting the server != rebooting the machine.)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23228692

This reminds me of my old workplace. Government owned company where everything was running on MS Excel, SAP, fax machines [0] and prayers from operative IT office.

I had to go to one of the more "exotic" server rooms, placed in a basement and saw a very old desktop stuffed on the bottom of a rack. Covered with dust, open side panels, plastic turned yellow, you know how old and forgotten hardware looks like. This had a new-ish post-it with the message: "this runs all of the fax infrastructure. you turn it off, you explain it to the CEO".

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fax

I worked for a company that had acquired a B-list, top 20 mmorpg - its database was mssql and had been running 24/7 for 5 years, with no way to back it up, no safety net, and an increasingly pissed off player community suffering degrading service. Everyone was terrified to reboot.

They started bouncing paychecks before I got to see the drama come to a head, but I'm obsessive about proper levels of redundancy anymore. Don't build fragility into a system, and at least leave yourself a means to fail gracefully.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23472870

Lol, yes. Maybe we’ve worked at the same places.

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