Logging in the Debugger's Toolkit

In this talk I will walk through two examples of particularly insidious bugs on legacy systems that I encountered in a previous life as an independent contractor. As these were poorly-understood but critical systems at companies with stretched resources, they were simply trusted to remain running, bugs handled with workarounds.

As the Internet comes of age, more and more of these neglected legacy systems remain online - it is key now more than ever to dig into code and carefully add new logging points to turn potential ticking time-bombs into well-polished, reliable assets.