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sessions

(not yet rated)

infectus

Jun 07, 2008 20:49

Read 543 times, Dig?

Once upon a time there was a young man who forgot to set the IP address of the new SMTP server for two of his customers' centers when he rolled out the new version of the code to them. Consequently, they were set to the default value which was localhost. Since there was no suitable mail relay on localhost, the customer's last three email marketing campaigns failed to be sent to anyone and vanished into the ether.

When the young man was alerted to this problem by the customer, he discovered the problem and quickly set the correct IP address for the customer. Unbeknownst to him, however, the evil session timeout goblins had expired the session and so when he posted the new IP address for the one customer, he actually posted all of that customer's server configuration settings to another completely innocent and unknowing customer, effectively overwriting not only the settings for being able to properly print waivers and receipts but also the poor customer's merchant account keys, directing all of their credit card transactions to the first customer's bank.

Two and a half hours went by before the young man was alerted to the waiver printing issue. He was not at his desk but was instead on a mission to the great co-lo facility known as Fisher Plaza. It took him almost ten minutes just to get the VPN tunnel established from his friend's laptop so he could try and investigate the customer's problem. He was shocked and dismayed to find that the session timeout goblins had fucked him again. He frantically tried to reset the poor customer's settings from memory which he was mostly able to do except for the 128-bit merchant account key which he had no way of remembering. He quickly disabled credit card transactions for the poor center so they would not be sending money to the wrong account and found the most recent backup of the poor customer's database. After restoring it to a secondary database on their server, he intoned the magic phrase:

select * from Configuration where ConfigurationProfileIdent = 'server'

The blessed key was retrieved and he inserted it into the customer's configuration settings post haste. After a quick call to the flustered but very understanding customer, all was well. The only thing that remained was to work with the lead developer to construct a new and more complicated magic phrase to retrieve all the credit card transactions that occurred during the estimated problem time range. Luckily, the gods were smiling, and there were only 7 transactions that would need to be reviewed. At half past midnight, the young man emailed the transaction details to the customer so he could discuss it with his merchant processor in the light of the next day.

The End.

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This story was written by infectus and has been brought you you by the letters N and X.

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