Ask HN: What’s your “don’t forget to check the power cord” advice?

2 pointsjtaft4 comments

Mine is don’t forget to check authentication flows in depth.

Bugs in Mfa, password reset, oauth integration, and “signature check” flows are hot spots.

If a program is using cryptographic primitives, this often leads to vulnerabilities.

Are the disks full? Flash don't like not having slack space.

I once read about old school sysadmins keeping a large dummy file that was a few percent of the total disk size (e.g. 2GB file on a 100GB disk). If a server ran out of disk in the middle of the night due to a bad config, logs filling up, etc., one could delete the file and create some troubleshooting time.

"slack file". If you used them as swap they weren't "wasted" but could still be retasked in emergencies.

many filesystem have "reserved space" where only root could actually fill the disk: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/7950/reserved-space...

That's similar to the old gamedev story called "The Programming Antihero" here: https://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/4111/dirty_coding_tri...

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