The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

ASP Holes

by Charles Robinson in Feature Articles on 2014-01-29

Dave was closing in on the end of his college career and receiving a degree in IT. He hoped to get his name out into the “real world” ahead of time, so he sent his meager resumé to a few head-hunters in hopes that they would line something up shortly after his tossed mortarboard hit the ground.

The problem was that he had no relevant work experience, since he spent college focusing on extra-curriculars (see: Chess Club, Magic: The Gathering tournaments, Keg Stand Saturdays). This seemed to limit Dave’s job prospects, until a Chicago-based company came calling. When they asked for an interview, he set aside the challenge it posed: a 3 hour drive, each way, during the school week, through insane Chicago traffic.

Balanced Registration

by Charles Robinson in Feature Articles on 2014-01-06

Peter was cautiously optimistic before the busiest part of open class enrollment season at his employer - Northeastern Institute of WTF. Peter and his team worked hard to implement a new user-friendly website for students to enroll in classes. Now, the brain-dead students who couldn’t figure out how to register should call the service-desk less. He even contracted a third-party datacenter with “state-of-the-art load balancing hardware” to handle the web traffic stress on the system. This would be the simplest enrollment season ever!

Three days before the enrollment deadline, all the procrastinating students (i.e. all the students) swarmed the website at once. Instead of being greeted with the shiny new enrollment site, they found the dreaded “Page Unavailable” screen - if they even got any response at all. This in turn loaded the IT support office’s phone lines with calls of “OMG I waited until the last minute to register for classes and now I can’t!!! I NEED Survey of Underwater Basket-Weaving or I won’t graduate!”

Peter and his staff of three got overwhelmed, so they flipped the switch on the phone system, activating the “We’re sorry, all lines are busy right now” prompt to stop the calls. With this chance to breathe and figure out the problem, Peter dug in to the network logs. There where myriad connection errors. The student traffic got to the remote load balancer but didn’t get a response.