Post AhYc87eRY6pXok6MAC by spot@social.afront.org
(DIR) More posts by spot@social.afront.org
(DIR) Post #AhYc84vLgnZRMIzJb6 by spot@social.afront.org
2024-05-04T15:58:47Z
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A little story from the "old days of open source": when I was a solutions architect for Red Hat, we visited a large telecommunications company, who wanted to consider moving their SMS infrastructure from UNIX to Linux, but they had a problem.1/5
(DIR) Post #AhYc86H0fkUXXm8800 by spot@social.afront.org
2024-05-04T15:58:53Z
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In their initial testing, they found Linux to be...too reliable. They didn't want customers to assume that every text message would go through, because they weren't willing to guarantee that, so they asked me if we would make them a custom kernel module.2/5
(DIR) Post #AhYc87eRY6pXok6MAC by spot@social.afront.org
2024-05-04T15:58:59Z
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What that module would do was simple: it would cause the kernel to randomly panic and halt. Not in a configurable way, just off a random seed, Russian Roulette style. They wouldn't know when it was going to happen, but it would eventually happen.3/5
(DIR) Post #AhYc89ItPCmQwU2Aqm by spot@social.afront.org
2024-05-04T15:59:04Z
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Needless to say, I was horrified. I knew that we could have written that, but ignoring the liability concerns, I knew that would be a support nightmare when all the people involved in "Project Footgun" were gone and someone in support was trying to figure out why these machines would randomly 💀4/5
(DIR) Post #AhYc8BHu1rB15zaPaK by spot@social.afront.org
2024-05-04T15:59:10Z
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I may have jokingly suggested they just use the NVIDIA driver, but we declined to build this thing. I'm quite certain that they could have found someone else to make it for them, but I never heard if they did or not.5/5