Thread

Arbitrarily writing *ALL* errors to the database is in fact *NOT* a good idea.

Interesting things happen when connections to the database fail.

-Lee

Back story…

I have been hosting a charity site for some college kids… so they had this programmer write them an app for their project, but he does’nt live here and I did not feel like giving him shell access to my server to read logs (Seems shady like….)

So he wrote a function that writes all errors to his database, so he can retrieve them via RSS… actually kinda sweet.

So he sends it to the college kids to upload to me, I provided them with the info ahead of time for the DB… however the connection string was still localhost blah blah etc… I uploaded it without checking….(Not being paid for it)

So they browse to the site…

I swear I am balder….

I had no idea the script tried to write errors to the database.
I also assumed this programmer was somewhat logical in his approach to coding.

So in the end when I finally figured out what the hell was going on, I wrote an if then else to check for db connection before trying to write to the database

You see the issue there right?

Tries to connect to the database and fails, tries to write that failure to the database and fails, tries to write that failure to the database…...................

I almost pissed myself!

What happens after it tries to write the failure to the database and fails?

love it lee!

Thats one way to make server go boom. We need to start compiling lists of how NOT to crash your server in CI. I found a few… :-$