• RockRobotRock 3 hours ago |
    Shout out to the Jeff Geerling video about this
  • cube00 3 hours ago |
    Author needs to decide which end of the stratum stack they want as the top.

    > This design from 2010 had at the top stratum 1 sources at Australia's National Measurement Institute (NMI)

    > Among otherwise comparable candidates, the lower stratum carries more weight.

  • rcaught 3 hours ago |
    > Each decision solved the problem in front of it. Nobody was asked to look at the sum of all actions.

    This is the perfect description of Telstra as a company.

    • jiggawatts 26 minutes ago |
      This reminds me of this: https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/2015/03/26/why-we-...

      I saw the talk version of that and it has lodged in my memory. The point he made was that "health.gov" was made by a bunch of teams that made sure that their part worked, but nobody was in charge of making the whole thing work.

      This is sadly "normal" for large bureaucracies.

      Every time I see a giant, multi-million dollar catastrophe, it's always "proper", "documented", "enterprise", "by the book", and... "a total failure". The reason is always that nobody actually cares about the final outcome, only the paperwork in front of them that they need fill out, the checkbox that needs to be ticked, or the compliance requirement that needs to be met.

  • scriptsmith 2 hours ago |
    • anitil an hour ago |
      They're pretty readable, I recommend that second one (though it leaves some questions I have unanswered). It's a good example of how latent issues with a large system can go unrecognised for a long time before a seeming unrelated change can trigger a cascading failure
  • _kb 2 hours ago |
  • ipython 2 hours ago |
    All I could think of while reading this was “has no one heard of ntptrace?”
  • rmunn 2 hours ago |
    It's funny, but I had the same thing happen to me once. One day, overnight, my computer decided it was 2006.

    It happened twenty years ago...

    ;-)