What the Fastly outage can teach us about writing error messages

Re:What the Fastly outage can teach us about writing error m... by cbsks on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @11:45PM (#27444000)

> So that looks like a stock Varnish 503

Looks like it, except that Varnish has it spelled “Guru Meditation”, not “Guru Mediation”. Anyone know why that would be?

https://github.com/varnishcache/varnish-cache/search?q=medit...

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What the Fastly outage can teach us about writing error m... by donavanm on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @12:07AM (#27444125)

You've found a kind "trap street". This disambiguates the error message generated from Fastly vs the error message generated from an origin which happens to use varnish as well.

Edit: As to why Fastly wants to expose the relatively stock error message instead of custom text, I dont know. My guess would be Faslty (or their customers) have tooling built around parsing the http response and they're preserving compatibility.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What the Fastly outage can teach us about writing error m... by dormando on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @01:35AM (#27444560)

https://twitter.com/dormando/status/1402466173778677764

my fault. I would sometimes monitor for "guru mediations" popping up to tell if we were throwing errors without it being caught by other systems. Among other reasons.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What the Fastly outage can teach us about writing error m... by miyuru on Wednesday June 09, 2021 @01:32AM (#27444546)

this question was already answered in the fastly outage thread.

It was to identify fastly's Varnish vs customer's Varnish.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27433139

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:What the Fastly outage can teach us about writing error m... by herpderperator on Tuesday June 08, 2021 @11:57PM (#27444062)

Try searching an older branch manually. GitHub only searches the main branch.

[ Parent | on HN ]