←back to thread

War story: the hardest bug I ever debugged

(www.clientserver.dev)
462 points jakevoytko | 2 comments | 24 Mar 25 14:37 UTC | HN request time: 0s | source
Show context
jason_tko ◴[27 Mar 25 12:47 UTC] No.43493036[source]▶
Reminds me of the classic bug story where users couldn’t send emails more than 500 miles.

https://web.mit.edu/jemorris/humor/500-miles

replies(2): >>43493179 #>>43497389 #
1. decimalenough ◴[27 Mar 25 19:49 UTC] No.43497389[source]▶
Crashes only on Wednesdays:

https://gyrovague.com/2015/07/29/crashes-only-on-wednesdays/

replies(1): >>43497824 #
2. BoorishBears ◴[27 Mar 25 20:31 UTC] No.43497824[source]▶
I experienced "crashes after 16 hours if you didn't copy the mostly empty demo Android project from the manufacturer and paste the entire existing project into it"

Turned out there was an undocumented MDM feature that would reboot the device if a package with a specific name wasn't running.

Upon decompilation it wasn't supposed to be active (they had screwed up and shipped a debug build of the MDM) and it was supposed to be 60 seconds according to the variable name, but they had mixed up milliseconds and seconds