Typos, Server Farms, and You
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TypoIn my profession we have a hallowed concept which goes by a few different names:
Entry of a mistake in typing or printed matter resulting from human or mechanical failures of some kind.
| gigo | "garbage in garbage out" |
| jijo | "junk in junk out" |
I'd love to say that these never happen to me, but I find they recur with increasing frequency ... which appears to correspond with my advancing age.
However, I am most careful at CLI (command line interface) entries to attempt to ensure that I understand what I'm doing BEFORE I press the Enter key at a command prompt ... particularly in Unix operations where these errors can devastate the install in no time.
I was reading about a typo bringing down a big piece of the internet yesterday. It seems that an amazon "employee error" resulted in "hundreds of thousands" of web sites being taken offline via the glitch on the S3 platform secondary to an attempt to fix an errant billing server.
It seems that one of the inputs to the command utilized to fix the billing server was entered incorrectly. The S3 farm is said to service some 40 percent of the public cloud market with said snafu resulting in an explanation and apology from Amazon.
In the aftermath all one can really say is that to err is human and as such typos are simply a fact of life.