Tech

apoplol.xyz has its first RCA

RCA-00001: Flying too high on wings of feather and wax

Alex Popell

• 3 min read
apoplol.xyz has its first RCA

An RCA, or Root Cause Analysis, is the IT "walk of shame." After an incident, people write up reports about what went wrong (I screwed up), why it went wrong (I can't read), how to stop it from going wrong in the future (Faraday cage around my apartment). That report is what an RCA is. It's a tool with potent lesson-teaching and shame-producing capability.

Hubris means "excessive pride or self-confidence." It's a problem I've only faced once in my life (maybe more times, hard to know). Last night I fell victim to my hubris.

Martin Prince's hubris

I was on my 8th hour, 2nd evening of troubleshooting a problem with my router, and I was sleepy because I don't sleep well if my router (the aPopGate) and I are in the middle of a fight. I solved the issue (like freakin' cyber-Sherlock Holmes) by rolling back a recent update on aPopGate. Sometimes it takes 8 hours to think of clicking one button (stuff like this is why there is no comment section).

I slept on the futon that night

I was happy, I wanted to tell the world of my struggle and subsequent triumph:

My hubris. Names of the innocent have been protected.

It was maybe 6 hours later that I noticed some weirdness on my network. I had  accidentally made all external web traffic appear to my server like it was coming from inside the network (more things are allowed for the devices inside the network 😉).

This is a problem, and a good reason to really think about what you're doing when you mess around with internet settings. A lot of my fun little programs and services became visible to the public internet. It's kind of like forgetting to lock your front door. Someone would have to know it's open, but it doesn't feel nice when you come home and realize it.

Stuff like this was just out there for hours

Thankfully, they're all password-protected in several different ways, because I kind of expected something like this to eventually happen (I've broken enough stuff to know that I break stuff). It was still a little more of my network than I felt comfortable showing the world. At any point someone could've gone to apoplol.xyz/share and seen the random pictures I put there for my Dockercraft demonstration. The very idea makes me sick to my stomach.

I'm Homer, my services are Bart, the world is a Steel Mill Dance Club that works hard... and plays hard.

Don't call yourself a "_____ God," I suppose is the moral here. You're just tempting fate.