I have a challenge for the geeks reading this. Make this program crash.
First some background. Part of our server loadbalancing works by opening connections to the machines in question, if the connection opens, it assumes it’s all good, if it fails – it implements the failover setups.
One problem is that one of our services keeps accepting connections even if it’s already half-dead – making the test less than adequate. So we came up with the idea of writing a small daemon that listens on another port, the loadbalancer can check that. This new daemon will just accept the connection, then drop it straight away. Simple design see. It should also be basically crashproof – if it’s not there, that means ‘server is definitely dead’.
So I got to write the daemon. It is called alived. It runs as it’s own unprivileged user on port 10432 and should be completely secure since all connections are dropped right after being accepted.
However, we are concerned how it will hold up under load – so I was asked to give people the chance to try and crash it. Unfortunately I only have a debian/ubuntu package available at the moment, but that should cover a lot of people anyway, and the package is completely alien-safe for other cases.
So my challenge is, please install it, try to make it crash. Anything you can come up with – and if you do, post in the comments and let me know how you did it.
Sound like fun ?