The happy place

Once many years ago, in a previous chapter of my life, there was summer outside; sun shining pleasantly on the streets of the city in which I dwelled at the time.

For some reason I was tasked with setting up a HA FTP solution for some niche client need which I need not detail here, but I wanted an active/active setup because active/passive is a thing which I will always avoid if possible, because in my experience the one time you get to try whether the standby service is actually working is when the active one has failed. Unless of course you write runbooks on confluence which describes routines for regularly failing over in a controlled manner or some shit like that. I don’t like it.

So anyways I was of course something of a key person being as I am, a very (some would say) skilled sysadmin, so there was a high demand on my expertise and to fight the stress associated with the intense workload I regularly went to fitness classes. Preferably fitness dancing as I am somewhat of a dance savant in that I become one with the music. I love the fitness music it can be that song with Katy Perry; something something rythm or chandelier by Sia it something like that which I just love.

Anyway as I was dancing there, one with the music, suddenly it was like God himself from out of nowhere said to me to set the PASV port ranges differently on the ftp servers, and mirror that config in HAProxy and then that’s all there is to it.

Of course that might seem self evident, but the cool thing was that like I said it came out of nowhere and I had a similar revelation yesterday when looking at the new chicken coup extension: paint it like the chicken coup from which it protrudes, except the other way around: make the red things green, the green things white and the white things red.

We’ll see how it looks but it’s probably gonna look great.