Web design & FOSS
Front-end web technologies and Free Open Source Software.
Monday 8 June 2009, 8:40 AM
Reboot bandicoot!
An old friend of mine, Download Dave, used to shout out “Reboot bandicoot!” every time his mac used to crash. This was a cultural reference to Crash Bandicoot, a computer game from way back when.
Recently I've been working in the Big Smoke at The Agency (no, not the CIA but a nameless creative agency, anonymised to protect the innocent). One of the jobs was for a huge multinational software company, using their proprietary server side technology. For various security and logistical reasons, I didn't have permissions to reboot the server, which is what I needed to do after updating various XML files.
The workaround? Break the machine!! Simply rewrite some invalid XML, refresh the browser, which crashed the server, fix the XML, refresh and reboot bandicoot! I love it when lo-tech solutions just work...
PreviousComments on this post
Gee? Would you tell us which brand of server it was if we guessed correctly? (Looking at the embedded links would be cheating. Something to do with tennis, badmiton or volleyball I think.)
There was supposed to be a fix for that. Thank goodness I'm not an IT (microsoft) admin anymore.
Hmmm, I think I signed an NDA, so no can do ;)
I'm sure there _is_ a fix but the sysadmin was running around quite a bit. Setting up dev environments does seem to be quite a laborious process.
I used to work at a place where the very organised, knowledgable and norwegian sysadmin set up a system of virtual machines, and it worked a treat (linux, of course ;)
That is definitely a plus for VMs. When I'm writing code especially when its Visual Studio (yuck) its really nice to be able to dump the VM containing the VS IDE in the trash. Drop a copy of the master clone image with a clean VS IDE right back into the VM container and start fresh again.
The particular "reset server" option was something I ran into purely by accident. And when I realized what I had done, I decided it was better to not inform the IT guy until I was finished with the project! Made things a lot faster to work on.
