Missing or dumped

Looks like trouble in Blogger space. I had a draft post set for today but couldn't publish. I also had a post yesterday which has disappeared. Well, it didn't disappear, it was "removed" by the technicians at Google Blogger who decided that wiping out the work of the bloggers who depend upon Google was the best way to proceed.

I was a tech once. Sometimes you had to just back up a bit and reboot. Still, before you did, you made sure you could recover everything up to that point. The systems I worked on were not this complex, however.

So we're stuck with what we've got.

Which Wednesday when they first caused the problem. Yeah, I think they caused it trying to fix something. I don't know how many times I had to clean up the "fixes" someone tried before my shift started.

I am reminded of a call I got one late evening to come into work. It seems that when the system went into its nightly diagnostics, it would crash. Repeatedly. So I came in. The first question I asked was "Did you back out the update that was run a few hours ago?" The answer was "No." Then I asked, "Did you back out the overwrites (patches) that were put in place after the update?" Again, the answer was "No."

So I said, "Let's first back out the overwrites and see if that helps." Again, the response was "No" because the support center decided that "wasn't the problem."

And it wasn't. Until I pointed out that one of the patch addresses involved was figuring prominently in the problem, according to the error reports. That patch was backed out and the system stabilized.

Sometimes, the fix is the problem.