Primary, Secondary, Tertiary

I've been following the situation with Boeing's 737 MAX airliners. I came across an article (archive.is / image) on USA Today that was a pretty good summary.

In that article they mentioned that Boeing's 777 airliner's flight computers were not only triple redundant but from different manufacturers.

For the 777, Boeing's twin-aisle intercontinental jet, engineers created triple redundancy for its computers, hydraulics, communications and electrical power. Perhaps the best illustration of the lengths the company was willing to go on backups was found in the plane's primary flight computer. It was built with three microprocessors instead of one, and each came from a different manufacturer: Intel, AMD and Motorola, according to an account by a Boeing engineer.

I like their thinking. One of our clients was doing a backup solution consisting of external USB drives that he was going to alternate weekly and take home. For his needs that was good but I encouraged him to buy two different brands of external USB drives. Just in case.

This reminded me of an old post of mine on redundancy.

At FedEx we learned to have primary, secondary, and tertiary plans. When loading an airplane 1) run weights and balances, 2) put ballast in the front of the plane, and 3) tie the nose wheel to the ground. And always have a backup plane, e.g. "Plan Z."

And an older post on "Belt, suspenders, and raincoat."

I've been known to carry an umbrella as well.

Wyze Cam

I'm not big into surveillance cameras but a while back I thought I had deer playing in my back yard. I wanted to capture them jumping the fence.

I came across the Wyze Cam. It is a cube about 2" on each side. It takes 1080p video and automatically records a 10-15 second video when it detects motion or sound. These are encrypted and uploaded to Amazon AWS where they are available for 14 days with no subscription plan required. These snippets are also stored on the microSD card if available and the last 32GB are retained. That's a lot of 15 second videos.

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While the Wyze Cam is intended for indoor usage, it is pretty tolerable of outdoors. I have mine on a screened in porch.

Watch the cat walk around!

Notice how it highlights motion.

It has infrared LEDs so you get black and white video at night. Initially I placed mine on the porch table near the screen. The infrared LEDs produced a glare from the screen so I taped over them. I still got good video with the ambient lighting. I could have just turned them off with the app.

It connects to your Wi-Fi and there are apps for Android and iOS. It will connect to Amazon's Echo if you have one with a screen.

You can set it to send you an e-mail when it detects an event, motion and/or sound. I haven't used that.

It comes with a variety of mounting bases but I have mine just sitting on a table.

Its power is USB and it comes with an AC adapter. I've thought about putting it away from the house and running it off of a battery pack.

The Wyze Cam costs $39 with shipping and a 32GB microSD it needs card to allow local recording. If you have a spare microSD card laying around you can get the camera and shipping only for $26.

There's even an open source project to let you connect the Wyze Cam to an existing security system. And of course there's a subreddit.

Here's some screenshots from the Android app.

The intruder in my back yard wasn't a deer but a raccoon.

Outage Communication

This post isn't bashing cloud providers, although that's an easy target.

What this is about is to give some examples of outage communication from various providers. And yes, Google and Facebook are in different sectors but the wide differences in their outage communications are still interesting.

On March 12, 2019, Google suffered an outage that impacted Gmail and a variety of their services that depended on their file system. Over the next several hours they posted 3 updates on their G Suite Status Dashboard. The first noted that they were having an outage. The second update was posted in under 2 hours and stated that they were continuing to investigate. It also enumerated the services that were impacted. The final update was 2 and 1/2 hours later and said that the issue was resolved.

But Google didn't stop there. 2 days later they posted a thorough postmortem (archive.is) that identified a root cause and remediation and prevention.

That's the way to communicate.

On March 13, 2019 Facebook had a 14-hour outage which took down the Facebook social media service, its Messenger and WhatsApp apps, Instagram, and Oculus.

Here's Facebook's communication on that outage.

Yes, that's it.

Which of these would you prefer from your services provider? Ask about that before you sign a contract and consider putting a requirement for communication and follow-up in the contract.

Just Don't Play Facebook Games

If you're my friend on Facebook, please don't play games on Facebook. When you do, you authorize Facebook to share your profile information with the game company. This often includes details such as the Facebook user ID, a list of Facebook friends (that's where I come in), likes, photos, groups, checkins, and user preferences like movies, music, books, interests, and other.

Once the game company has your data (and mine) Facebook has no control over what the game company does with it or who it shares it with.

Oh, I'm sure they have policies about what can be done with the data but there really is no way to enforce it.

As an example, the company that operated the "At the Pool" Facebook game, left all their Facebook user profiles, etc, on a publicly accessible Amazon Web Services (AWS) server for anybody to access.

Here's an excerpt from an article on ZDNet on this Facebook data leakage:

[T]he company has lost control over its most important asset - its users' data - which is now leaking left and right from all the no-name companies and mom-and-pop developer firms who've collected it over the past few years.