Take nothing for granted

on Wednesday May 18, 2005 2218h by Jonathan
in Jonaize, Victoria School

Today was the beginning of the Head Prefect Elections 05 (HPE .05). Extensive coding was complete, testing was carried out and we were all set to start the elections.

Carried out a quick run through the system 5 mins before the elections were open. All systems go. Deployed the probates and prefects to their respective rooms and prepared to sit back, relax, and enjoy my automated system feed me up to the minute updates on whats going on.. All was well…

And then BAM! Connections to the voting system (on jonaize.com) started dropping like ripe durians off the durian tree. Drop. Drop. Drop. Gateway Timeout.

Damn. I thought my server had crashed, Nope. I thought my script was down, Nope. I thought I was being DDoSed (attacked if you don’t know what DoS is), Nope. So what the fish was wrong?!?!??!

Panic. Tries everything in my power to restore access. Failed. Got a prefect to ask someone to test my server from his computer. Works fine. EH?!?!?!?!?!?

Ok. To cut a long story short, MOE (or a server upstream from them) decided to block access to jonaize.com. Wonderful. Called off the first round of elections, started contemplating what would be the next best course of action.

Finally decided to recode the system to port it to the VS server. So with renewed determination, and a whole 3 hours to do it, I set down and got to work, aided along by the loud laughter, signing and gossiping of those in the room.

End result: system ported (though not fully) and I managed to get the e-lect system up and running. Very messy, very inconvenient, extremely stressful, but no choice.

Moral of the story: Take nothing for granted. Account for everything. Bah, some lessons need to be learned the hard way…

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