NOTE: I am a professional computer nerd. I don't spend my day-to-day fixing this and restarting that. I design resilient, high performance, integrated infrastructures that do complicated things and then I build them. The monkeys that report to me (they're actually brilliant sysadmins and not real monkeys but they all have the foresight of monkeys) do the day-to-day turning of knobs and fixing of doodads. This is a sort of techie nerd thing superficially but I think this can apply to almost any area of professional endeavor.
Technical background: For those that don't know, DNS is the name of the service that translates hostnames/domain names into the numeric IP addresses that everything on the internet actually uses to connect to pornhub or snipershide or democraticunderground or whatever. When you type in https://google.com your web browser asks DNS what the shit that means and DNS translates it into a set of numbers that looks something like 1.2.3.4. IP's are not really human legible so we use DNS. When DNS breaks people scream.
For actual years I've been dealing with a glitch where inside my network some computer's IP address to name mapping simply won't be resolvable by DNS at all and some have to be looked up certain ways for it to work but the real hell of it was, it was transient. It'd be bad with one hostname one minute and fine the next. I knew there had to be a misconfiguration in a DNS server somewhere but I don't run all of the DNS servers in my network, only some of them. Yesterday we finally found it while working on something else entirely. Server A used Server B as a secondary source of DNS services and Server B used Server A as the primary source of DNS service meaning that sometimes a dependency loop was created. This was caused by a former member of my team who quit because he resented the way that I always insist on really thinking things through and often taking the difficult route to making things better. He set it up like that without telling anyone basically out of a habit of approaching systems administration with a shortsighted, unwise, manual and piecemeal approach. It occurred to me while writing up the post mortem report and incident report that there was an acronym there, one that in itself defined wonderfully the thing it is an acronym for. SUMP: A pit that gathers gunk.
SUMP methodology eschews rigorous thought or even basic personal responsibility and tosses duty to the hyenas. The opposite would be something like "predictive, wise, automated, integrated" but the acronym doesn't work. So, I ask you all to chip in and help me come up with a suitable self-descriptive acronym which has something of the same meaning in the constituent words. Go.
Technical background: For those that don't know, DNS is the name of the service that translates hostnames/domain names into the numeric IP addresses that everything on the internet actually uses to connect to pornhub or snipershide or democraticunderground or whatever. When you type in https://google.com your web browser asks DNS what the shit that means and DNS translates it into a set of numbers that looks something like 1.2.3.4. IP's are not really human legible so we use DNS. When DNS breaks people scream.
For actual years I've been dealing with a glitch where inside my network some computer's IP address to name mapping simply won't be resolvable by DNS at all and some have to be looked up certain ways for it to work but the real hell of it was, it was transient. It'd be bad with one hostname one minute and fine the next. I knew there had to be a misconfiguration in a DNS server somewhere but I don't run all of the DNS servers in my network, only some of them. Yesterday we finally found it while working on something else entirely. Server A used Server B as a secondary source of DNS services and Server B used Server A as the primary source of DNS service meaning that sometimes a dependency loop was created. This was caused by a former member of my team who quit because he resented the way that I always insist on really thinking things through and often taking the difficult route to making things better. He set it up like that without telling anyone basically out of a habit of approaching systems administration with a shortsighted, unwise, manual and piecemeal approach. It occurred to me while writing up the post mortem report and incident report that there was an acronym there, one that in itself defined wonderfully the thing it is an acronym for. SUMP: A pit that gathers gunk.
SUMP methodology eschews rigorous thought or even basic personal responsibility and tosses duty to the hyenas. The opposite would be something like "predictive, wise, automated, integrated" but the acronym doesn't work. So, I ask you all to chip in and help me come up with a suitable self-descriptive acronym which has something of the same meaning in the constituent words. Go.
