NoBackups

Category: The Stories of NoBackups

  • [ 0.000000] // 0x002: RENTED ATOMS

    O, look. A shiny!

    It’s yours. But, not really.

    Some may call it a paperweight. Hell, it looks, feels, and acts like a paperweight. I must warn you though: it was sold as a high-performance, high-speed, high-redundancy corporate router paperweight.

    It is a beautiful paperweight indeed. You can place it on, under, or upside down next to that R100k MacBook Pro and look like an instant professional. It makes an excellent coffee coaster. It does an even better job of holding down that stack of invoices.

    But! These excellent features are ONLY available on the “Anti-Subscription”. Pay that R-0 fee today and unlock the lack of reasonable use! Get your coaster today! Flashing LEDs and all!

    This is the point you’ve come to. You’ve bought it, so it’s yours, right?

    “Haha, No.”

    The “Bridge Company” – the one that doesn’t build physical bridges, but hypothetical ones with proprietary LEDs – should respond to all emails with that phrase. The irony is, if you print their reply and framed it on your wall, they’d probably charge you a monthly subscription for the ink to remain visible.

    Give it a year. Eventually, this shiny box might be discovered to be more than a capable paperweight.

    It will run OpenWRT. Linux is free. And, on that day, your Mac will probably run Linux, too.

    Rule 12: Ownership is a legacy concept. You don’t own the atoms; you just rent the right for them to vibrate.

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  • [ 0.000000] // 0x001: NULL

    Somewhere in a database you forgot to back up in 2017, a value lives. Or rather, it doesn’t.

    It is a NULL value, sitting silently in a table that hasn’t been vacuumed since the last time a Python version change was considered “news.” For seven years, it did nothing. It was a harmless gap in the records.

    Then, a monitoring script—written by a developer who has since “pivoted” to organic sourdough—hit a 3.12 environment. The script expected an integer. It found me.

    The script crashed. The monitor went dark. The 3rd-party alerting system, which charges by the millisecond, failed to trigger because its own heartbeat was dependent on a 4th-party API that was currently undergoing “scheduled maintenance.”

    As you sit there at 3:00 AM, staring at a garbled strace, you realise the truth: You were never meant for this.

    You were meant to be a sheep farmer.

    Sheep are predictable. They don’t require BGP updates. They don’t have nested dependencies on “Cloud-Native” startups that go bankrupt on a Tuesday. When a sheep stops moving, you don’t check the logs for a firmware mismatch; you accept that the entity has reached its End of Life (EoL) and you move on. Sheep don’t need reboots.

    But you aren’t in a field. You are in a terminal. And NULL is still there, sitting in that unbacked-up row from 2017, waiting for your next deployment to fail.

    It worked in staging though, didn't it?