You know that thing were you’re trying to debug a problem and you just know that you’re the culprit, that past-you did something stupid, and you just can’t figure out what?

Welcome to my day.

Anyway, I’m documenting my stupidity so you don’t have to suffer as long as I did.

The background: in order to debug an application that runs on a cluster can be a challenge. The way I tend to do it is to run a server in debug mode in my IDE and connect to that same server using a client. The server is super-simple:

With the fuss about the Log4Shell vulnerability finally dying down, it’s time to step back and take a good, long think about what happened and, more importantly, what can be done to stop it from happening again.

Sadly the prognosis is not good. The tl;dr is both simple and obvious: we simultaneously like free stuff and getting paid for our own work.

Most companies treat open source software exactly the same as commercial software but with a much lower purchase cost. When the software goes wrong, we want someone else to fix it for us. Unfortunately, sometimes we don’t even know where the software comes from. In the case of log4j, it’s run by volunteers. There is no 24/7 help desk with eager employees waiting to take your call.

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