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Hardest bug #1:

With some custom embedded electronics, the ADC would work fine in a lab setting but always throw out garbage in the field. Now, about 500 of these had been running fine in the field themselves since February. Turned out there was a bug in the FPGA that controlled the ADC and at somewhere around 80 degrees fahrenheit, there was enough of a propagation delay that the ADC wouldn't start up correctly. Since the other units were started in February when it was 25 degrees and only a few had been restarted, it wasn't noticed.

That was frustrating.

Another fun one was the rapid degradation of a database when the write-back cache battery on the RAID controller failed on the write-ahead logging disk and nobody was notified.

Right now I've been battling a random corruption NFS bug for a few weeks. Recently thought it was the automounter but the bug has appeared in a few other nodes since:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/20460238/random-corruptio...



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