In this blog of #DebuggingFeb, I am going to share the story of one of the hectic bugs of all time that I managed to solve somehow on the deployment day at the deadline. I will share how I got to this problem and what steps did I take to solve it and how this bug got solved at the very end day. Deploying the project on the day was my main priority and somehow I managed to do so.

Introduction

Errors can be of different types and may come at different stages of development, whether it is in the coding stage, prototyping stage, deployment stage or production stage. As a programmer or developer, it's common to get scrapped by bugs but as well as know we love bugs. But in my case it's beyond that, after a lot of tries and attempts, It was so an unconventional bug that I lost my self-control and turned my PC off at that very instance.

But in the end, I got to know that It was one of the silliest mistakes in my career.

There is a famous quote "It's not a bug - it's an undocumented feature".

I was in a national Level Hackathon "DeltaThon 3.0 " with my teammates in Dharan Nepal and was working on a project "Unified Health System" which tries to solve the biggest problem in medical history. We were using Node js, React Js, Mongo DB and Linode for the development. I was not new to Linode as I had hosted some of my sites on Linode but this time it was different than others.

What was the Problem?

We were in a 24 Hour long hackathon and everything went smoothly up. We were enjoying coding and whatever we can do to enjoy it, we were doing. 2 hours before the submission of the hackathon Project, we created a new Linode Account and served our project into it. we Were very happy that we completed our project and can showcase it to the judges but suddenly everything changed with just one email.

Debugging

This type of error was new to me personally as well as to my teammates too. We were very under pressure at that time as the hackathon's time was about to end and the Organizing committee was frequently coming to remind us to update the project summary in their portal so that they can evaluate internally too.

We were thinking that this hackathon went out of our hands and was seriously demotivated at the instance. We searched on google and searched for the relevant questions in the Linode Community portal but nothing worked for us.

We deleted that Linode server again and created a new one the same problem got occurred with us in that Hackathon.

We restarted the Linode server and changed the entry port but nothing worked for us, at last, we were forced to tweet to the Linode official Twitter handle.

Just 30 minutes were remaining for the project submission, we decided to change the server and host on the Heroku server but it was too late for it, so finally we decided to submit a local server link that was hosted on our computer and can be accessed by a device which was connected to the same network. Luckily this time we got a green flag in our hands and we got permission for it and we submitted the project.

Result

We were not expecting anything this time in this hackathon as we got into a big blunder at the very end. But There's a saying, "Hard Work Pays Off". We got crowned as the national level champions in the main Event Deltathon. We were feeling so Lucky that despite the unexpected bug at the very end we were the first position holder in the hackathon.

Post Event Debugging

We came home after being crowned as the winner of the hackathon, but the frustration was not still over, I tried to find what was the actual reason that I was getting the unexpected "Brute Force Attack" reason for the temporary suspension of my Linode server. I researched a lot but none of them worked, I was thinking to drop this project and not hosting it in the Linode Server but I want to give it a last try. So I again deleted my existing Linode Server and again created a new one.

This time the different thing was my credentials to access the server. The previous credential was very easy to guess and was a very common password but this time I tried a different one and guess what, Luckily this time my Linode server does not get suspended and I finally got to know what was the actual reason that this problem occurred to me.

Learning

As a developer, we always want to build our projects in a hurry and we do small mistake that impacts us in a long run. Likewise, I always use passwords Like 1234 or admin1234 etc for testing purposes which became a matter of problem and could lead us to the verge of disqualification from the event. After this incident, I always use something secure password, for testing purposes also.

Conclusion

As a developer or normal users, we need to ensure that we must use a secure password while creating an account on whatever platform we are using. One silly mistake could lead to an unexpected problem that can lead to a huge blunder. Nevertheless, I overcome the problem and became successful to find out the root cause for the temporary suspension of my Linode Account.