In Which Saydrah is Given an Unwise Command

[Saydrah]

I was given a new assignment a few weeks ago: Break Disaboom.

We launched a new program and were hoping to get a ton of interest (we have) and the person running that program told me, "Your new objective is to send so many people to the site that you crash the server."

I didn't crash the server yet, but I did manage to boost the traffic so much last night, and so suddenly, that the Dev Team was here until 8:00 PM trying to figure out why the site was so slow. Not until they got in this morning and heard my supervisor mentioning that I had doubled the site's traffic yesterday did they realize it was just my little blog causing them this headache.



That'll teach them to give a literalist instructions to break the site!

[Lachrymose]

Haha! Enjoy the preapproved chaos you can wreak.

[BlaqueKatt]

I was given a new assignment a few weeks ago: Break Disaboom.

We launched a new program and were hoping to get a ton of interest (we have) and the person running that program told me, "Your new objective is to send so many people to the site that you crash the server."

Sweet! I was given the job of "beta testing" an internal site and told to try and break it any way I could-took three hours-but I did it, though not the way then intended

[protege]

Been there, done that. In high school, one of the computer teachers told me to crash the network. The classroom was empty--I was in there during study hall, playing SimCity. I did as I was told, loaded up F-15 Flight Simulator...and promptly took down their entire network At least I didn't get into trouble for it

[lordlundar]

You know saying that to a computer geek is a bad idea.

Why? it's simple. If you tell them to crash the network, they will do it.

No potentials, no maybes, they will do it, and heaven help those who try to stop them.

MUAHAHAHAHA!

[Difdi]

I used to be a coder on this one MUD. Another coder had completely rewritten the way the game handled in-game items (expanding it from a 5000 line file to 85000) but between the time he finished the code and the time he was supposed to write documentation for the area builders using that code, he had some sort of real life meltdown and vanished from the net. The MUD owner didn't want to toss this masterpiece of code, but nobody had the first clue how to use all but the most basic functions. Among other things, it changed area building from entering codes in a text editor to an honest to dog GUI.

So I got the job of figuring out what he had done, testing it, and writing documentation. Thing is, this guy could have easily won a code obfuscation award. So it was slow going, and I actually got more done from the builder's interface than reading the source.

After a while though, the owner of the MUD asked me to limit the number of crashes I caused to only 2 per day. My record up to that point had been 37 crashes in 3 hours. With the 2 per day limit, it took me another month and a half to finally finish testing and writing docs.