Embedded code

From Sean Varley’s weblog:

Apparently the University of Wisconsin and Netgear have a problem.  It looks like Netgear hard coded the SNTP IP address into some embedded devices for network time sync and now the school gets the pleasure of servicing a few hundred thousand requests per second.  You can read about it here.

Wow…seems to me the moral of this story is twofold.

#1 - don’t ship a product that beats the crap out of someone else’s server.

#2 - don’t ship 700,000 units of your product until you’re pretty sure you’ve taken care of #1.

Yikes!