[HN Gopher] The Case of the Connection Timeout
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       The Case of the Connection Timeout
        
       Author : yarapavan
       Score  : 34 points
       Date   : 2021-04-22 09:35 UTC (13 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (mysteries.wizardzines.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (mysteries.wizardzines.com)
        
       | crazydoggers wrote:
       | Hmmm... but if I had know it was hosted on AWS at the beginning,
       | the security group would have been the first thing I checked
       | rather than curl or tcp dump, especially given the odd port. The
       | syn packet isn't exactly diagnostic... as is mentioned other
       | things can drop syn packets. For instance if your host file was
       | redirecting to a random IP which was firewalled... same issue.
       | 
       | Context is everything, and knowing your system and stacks rather
       | than single tools is important. What this shows me is that
       | partitioning of knowledge where only certain team members
       | understand certain things is the real danger.
        
       | CSSer wrote:
       | For those of you who enjoyed this, the author also created two
       | others you can find at https://mysteries.wizardzines.com/
       | 
       | I really enjoyed "The Case of the DNS Update that Didn't Work"
       | because I've definitely experienced that exact scenario on
       | multiple occasions (no spoilers).
        
       | saagarjha wrote:
       | The biggest takeaway here isn't the specific network debugging
       | skills used (though they are important, but you'll notice you can
       | still follow along if you don't know how to use them). It's
       | learning that you can solve your own problems, and that there are
       | little experiments you can run to debug issues even if you have
       | no idea what is going on. This is basically teaching the
       | scientific method to programmers, which I think is possibly the
       | single most important skill they could have in their toolbox
       | (computers are mostly deterministic, after all) and it is
       | shocking how many engineers don't have the ability or desire to
       | use this tool.
        
       | mrlonglong wrote:
       | I enjoyed that. Found the issue almost immediately !
        
       | barbazoo wrote:
       | This is great, I actually had fun solving this one and I learned
       | something too.
        
       | yarapavan wrote:
       | Read about the author's motivations, design decisions, and plans
       | at https://jvns.ca/blog/2021/04/16/notes-on-debugging-puzzles/.
        
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       (page generated 2021-04-22 23:01 UTC)