Tales from the Y2K Aftermath: A Year of Debugging

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October 9th, 2000. I remember it as another cool autumn day, but this year felt different. The dot-com bubble had burst earlier that year, and everyone was busy trying to figure out what came next in tech. Linux on the desktop was still an oddity for most folks, but open-source enthusiasm was growing among developers who were tired of proprietary bloat.

I worked at a small startup then, one of many struggling to find its footing after the boom went bust. The company was developing a SaaS platform that handled billing and customer management. Our main backend was built on Apache, MySQL, and Perl—pretty standard fare for web apps back then. But we were still learning as we went.

That morning, I got a call from our ops team. “Brandon, there’s something weird happening with one of our production servers,” they said. The server in question hosted a critical billing script that processed payments from hundreds of users daily. Without it, the business would grind to a halt.

I quickly hopped on a plane back to the office, where I found the ops team staring at some strange error messages scrolling by on their monitoring consoles. “The script is failing,” one of them said, “and we can’t figure out why.”

I took a look and saw this: Error 126: Cannot create process.

“Ah, interesting,” I thought to myself. Back in the day, this was often a Windows-only issue with file permissions or executable paths. But our server was running Linux. And it hadn’t been an issue before.

I spent most of that day digging through logs and trying different things. The first thing I did was check if any new packages were installed recently that could be causing the problem. Nothing stood out, so I started poking around in the script itself. It used a mix of Perl scripts and cron jobs to process payments, which seemed to work fine on our development and staging environments.

Then it hit me: “What about SELinux?” I asked myself. SELinux was still relatively new back then, but some distributions had it enabled by default. A quick sestatus command confirmed that the production server indeed had SELinux enforcing mode set up.

I remembered a blog post from a colleague who had faced similar issues due to overly restrictive SELinux policies. Maybe this was our culprit? I spent a few hours crafting custom rules for SELinux to allow the script to run smoothly. It felt like a dark art, but eventually, it worked.

The problem was solved, and the server went back up without any further hiccups. But this experience left me feeling somewhat uneasy about how robust our infrastructure was. We had been so focused on getting our platform up and running quickly that we hadn’t fully considered all the edge cases or potential security concerns.

In the weeks that followed, I began advocating for more rigorous testing in our development pipeline. It’s easy to fall into the trap of treating the production environment as a glorified beta test server when you’re under pressure, but it was clear now that this wasn’t good enough.

The Y2K scare was still fresh in everyone’s minds too. We had been through those long nights and days, and although 2000 came and went without any major incidents, it made us more aware of the importance of disaster recovery plans and failovers.

As we moved into late October, I found myself reflecting on how much tech had changed since Y2K. VMware was still a niche player, but it felt like they were making real strides in virtualization. Napster was all over the news, but we mostly just saw it as a way for our younger developers to share files and music rather than a business threat.

That’s what I thought about that day. Tech wasn’t standing still, but neither was life at work. We were still learning, adapting, and pushing forward despite the uncertainty of the times.

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This is the kind of reflection you’d write in your personal blog back then. It’s grounded in real work experiences and captures a slice of what it felt like to be a part of the tech industry during those early 2000s days.