Mark Dain So I'm at work and I RDP into a Windows Server machine. It displays a huge banner asking to restart now for updates or later. I accidentally clicked now. Can anyone explain the logic of Windows is given a maintenance window (1 AM) where it's allowed to reboot every night. It seriously can't wait till then? I just knocked a website offline :/

👽 Paul Webb Windows never makes any sense, good grief.

Mark Dain I wish we could use Linux at work. One of these days I think we will start using it but as our platform has been built on Windows for years, there's things that may not work correctly. I run into all kinds of issues developing on my local machine (MacBook Pro) only to see the code completely break when deployed to Windows.

Haaktu "But it worked on my machine!" Took me years to embrace the possibility of breakage between dev and production. Even on Windows to Windows.

Mark Dain Do you think it's possible to eliminate works-on-my-machine phenomena? I'm struggling with this at work right now. My most recent project (cloud encrypted backup system) uses a few command line programs like GNU Privacy Guard. This is far harder to make cross-platform friendly than regular PHP which mostly just works. I've been deploying this on each server one at a time. Probably 1 in 4 deployments failed to import the PGP key. One fix was DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR rather than /. But why did the other 3 of 4 servers succeed in importing the key even though the path was wrong? Nothing went wrong predictably.

Haaktu It is possible I think. Keep track of every version deployed in the machine of all participating binaries and keep them in sync. Patches, updates and the like, too. Test and test and test some more before deployment. But really, sometimes, Windows works in mysterious ways. I haven't achieved the level of fire-and-forget confidence like deploying to Linux or OpenBSD.