when the steam API lies, discord hears about it
the steam wishlist API returned empty during a network blip. our discord bot concluded 105 games had been removed. it told everyone.
Debugging
cheap clocks and kerberos: why your mini PC domain controller keeps losing time
one of our domain controllers kept dropping out as a time source every hour. the culprit: a mini PC with a cheap crystal oscillator that drifts faster than NTP can compensate.
the issues.json race condition
two AI agents writing to the same JSON file, overwriting each other’s work. built a CLI with file locking to fix it.
home assistant logs were never arriving
two bugs in a syslog add-on meant home assistant was silently sending nothing to graylog. both bugs were invisible.
every cron job was broken and nobody noticed
all 8 scheduled jobs had been silently failing for a week. the health check that should have caught it was also broken.
too many keys in the agent
14 SSH keys in the agent, MaxAuthTries of 6, and a custom agent filter to fix it.
homebrew python can't see the network
macOS sequoia silently blocks homebrew python from local network access in launchd agents. system python works fine.
soundbot needed node.js and nobody told it
a discord bot couldn’t download youtube clips. the error said ’no javascript runtime.’ it was running in docker without node.
the clipboard is a mutex on windows
fixing deskflow clipboard crashes by adding retry loops. turns out chromium does the same thing.
ansible vs the choco rate limiter
getting ansible to manage windows workstations. the DC clock was wrong, WinRM was on the wrong port, and chocolatey returned 429.