- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
- hackernews
- cross-posted to:
- programming@programming.dev
- hackernews
The issue was not caused, directly or indirectly, by a cyber attack or malicious activity of any kind. Instead, it was triggered by a change to one of our database systems’ permissions which caused the database to output multiple entries into a “feature file” used by our Bot Management system. That feature file, in turn, doubled in size. The larger-than-expected feature file was then propagated to all the machines that make up our network.
The software running on these machines to route traffic across our network reads this feature file to keep our Bot Management system up to date with ever changing threats. The software had a limit on the size of the feature file that was below its doubled size. That caused the software to fail.
Classic example of how dangerous rust is.
If they had just used Python and ran the whole thing in a try block with bare except this would have never been an issue.
Edit: this was a joke, and not well done. I thought the foolishness would come through.
So you think there is no error handling possible in Rust?
Wait until you find out that Pyhon doesn’t write the error handling by itself either…
Yeah, the Python equivalent would be something like this.
try: config = get_config() catch: sys.exit(1)It’s possible to handle these things, but if you explicitly don’t then you’ll discover them at runtime.
As a next step they should have wrapped everything in a true(while) loop so it automatically restarts and the program never dies
Exactly,
while True: try: main(); except: pass;This can happen regardless of language.
The actual issue is that they should be canarying changes. Push them to a small percentage of servers, and ensure nothing bad happens before pushing them more broadly. At my workplace, config changes are automatically tested on one server, then an entire rack, then an entire cluster, before fully rolling out. The rollout process watches the core logs for things like elevated HTTP 5xx errors.
honestly this was a coding cock-up. there’s a code snippet in the article that
unwraps on aResultwhich you don’t do unless you’re fine with that part of the code crashingi think they are turning linters back to max and rooting through all their rust code as we speak
I hope you’re joking. If anything, Rust makes error handling easier by returning them as values using the
Resultmonad. As someone else pointed out, they literally usedunwrapin their code, which basically means “panic if this ever returns error”. You don’t do this unless it’s impossible to handle the error inside the program, or if panicking is the behavior you want due to e.g. security reasons.Even as an absolute amateur, whenever I post any Rust to the public, the first thing I do is get rid of
unwrapas much as possible, unless I intentionally want the application to crash. Even then, I useexpectinstead ofunwrapto have some logging. This is definitely the work of some underpaid intern.Also, Python is sloooowwww.
I was joking, but oof it did not go over well.
Ah that makes sense. To be fair tho, there’s a lot of unwarranted hate towards Rust so it can be hard to tell.
I should bite the bullet and learn it.
I decided to learn zig recently, it feels like crafting artisanal software, which is what I liked C for. But it’s kinda janky in that each point version major features come and go (see io and async).
There’s a place for engineering software which is what rust seems great at. Definitely seems like a tool I could/would use as rust is taking over many of my tool workflows.