Identical differences

I no longer understand computers. I thought I used to but right now I’m not sure I know anything (which is perhaps a good thing?).

Its my fault I suppose. I’m supposed to be in charge, I’m supposed to be able to task and schedule changes, so the fact that where I work’s production environment still uses JServ is down to me (in the same way its my fault most of our remote users have this annoying RPC DOM virus thing, don’t you know) and the fact that I’m the only technical person in at all this week is again a buck that stops at my feet. But I digress.

When you have a number of identically configured servers, with binaries and libraries with identical MD5 signatures and the same source code and the same server configuration, you might be forgiven for expecting all those servers to behave that same. Its logical though, a few things that are the same should act the same, its a natural assumption. But no… one blasted server’s JVM just won’t stay up any longer than a 95 year old war veteran without Viagra can. Its looking like its a bug in the JVM’s GC but lets be honest, with JServ it might be the alignment of Jupiter’s moons causing a alight gravitational shift on Mars which in turn is sending indescribably small electrical pulses directly to this server… or not.

Ho hum. Never mind I have the weekly global management conference call in an hour. Hope I can stay awake.