🔥 The DB Grill 🔥

Oh, this is precious. "In the hopes that it saves someone else two hours later." Two hours. That's cute. That's the amount of time it takes for the first pot of coffee to go cold during a real incident. Two hours is what the sales engineer promises the entire "fully-automated, AI-driven, zero-downtime migration" will take. This blog post isn't just about an ISP; it's a perfect, beautiful microcosm of my entire career.

You see, that line right there, “Astound supports IPv6 in most locations,” I’ve seen that lie in a thousand different pitch decks. It’s the same lie as "Effortless Scalability" from the database that can't handle more than 100 concurrent connections. It's the same lie as "Seamless Integration" from the monitoring tool that needs a custom-built Golang exporter just to tell me if a disk is full. "Most locations" is corporate doublespeak for one specific rack in our Washington data center that our founder’s nephew set up as a summer project in 2017.

And the tech support agents? Perfect. Absolutely perfect. This is the vendor's "dedicated enterprise support champion" on the kickoff call.

“Yes, we do support both DHCPv6 and SLAAC… use a prefix delegation size of 60.”

I can hear him now. “Oh yes, Alex, our new database cluster absolutely supports rolling restarts with no impact to the application. Just toggle this little 'graceful_shutdown' flag here. It’s fully documented in the appendix of a whitepaper we haven't published yet.”

And there you are, just like this poor soul, staring at tcpdump at 2 AM, watching your plaintive requests for an address vanish into the void. For me, I'm not looking at router requests; I'm tailing logs, watching the leader election protocol have a seizure because the "graceful shutdown" was actually a kill -9. I'm watching the replication lag climb to infinity because "most locations" apparently didn't include our primary failover region in us-east-2.

And the monitoring? Don't even get me started. Of course, the main dashboard is a sea of green. The health check endpoint is returning a 200 OK. The vendor’s status page says "All Systems Operational". Why? Because we're monitoring that the process is running, not that it's actually doing anything useful. We're checking if the patient has a pulse, not if they're screaming for help. We'll get around to building a meaningful check for v6 connectivity or actual data replication after the post-mortem, right next to the action item labeled "Investigate Monitoring Enhancements - P3."

Every time I see a promise like this, I just reach for my laptop lid and find a nice, empty spot. This "Astound" ISP deserves a sticker right here next to my collection from QuerySpark, CloudSpanner Classic, and HyperClusterDB—all ghosts of architectures past, all promising a revolution, all delivering a page at 3 AM.

I can see it now. It'll be Labor Day weekend. Some new, critical, IPv6-only microservice for payment processing will be deployed to the shiny new cluster that's running in a "cost-effective" data center. The one the VP signed a three-year deal on because their golf buddy is the CRO of Astound. Everything will work perfectly in staging. Then, at 3:17 AM on Saturday, the primary node will fail. The system will try to fail over to the DR node. The one that's not in Washington.

And as the entire company's revenue stream grinds to a halt because we can't get a goddamn IP address, I'll be there, tcpdump running, muttering to myself, "but they told me to use a prefix delegation size of 60."