Out Of The Kerosene, Into The Fire


To distract you: this is just some random footage off my camera; I don’t have time to edit it and honestly it’s not that interesting. With a bit of luck, right now, I am either eating dim sum down on Canal St, or wandering around at The Met.

One chunk of metal going into an oven looks pretty much like any other chunk of metal. This one is different, I suppose – this one is mine.

Work quickly but precisely. One does not flail around knocking things over, and always think twice before you grab something.

------ divider ------

The log analysis/incident response project I was working on was surprisingly neatly and quickly completed. As much as I’m not a great fan of “cloud” computing, it’s pretty nice to have a great big server with an infinite-seeming amount of temporary space – although that does not encourage developers to think about their logs: they just splat stuff out and forget about it. And since everything is “elastic” you just stick things somewhere and forget about them. Imagine my delight when I started looking to see what I was dealing with and did a listing of the log directory: nothing happened for several seconds. I interrupted it and checked how many files there were in the directory (“ls | wc -l”) uh…  2.2 million logfiles. It was “only” about 400gb of data, but because of that bizzare layout it required 3 days to massage it all into an indexed structure I could search quickly, then the real work began. Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to see “is there anything abnormal happening in there?” Normally, I sit and drink coffee and think of it as a fascinating epistemological problem – “What is ‘normal’?” – but sometimes you just gotta start shoveling and see what’s under that big manure pile. Oh, looky, more manure!

Comments

  1. komarov says

    Ah, due dilligence at it’s finest: Everything is written down and records kept … somewhere. If you’re looking for something specific it’s up to you to find it. But it’s definitely in there. Good luck!

    P.S.: A mere ten seconds of distraction? Aw.