Patchwork Psychology

An application that was running fine started throwing this exception on startup: javax.naming.NameNotFoundException: Name java:comp is not bound in this Context. Tracing showed it came from code that was used to glean the database connection information from the environment (configured through context XML files).

I’m just finishing up a 65-hour week in which I was planning, executing and troubleshooting the first installation of a load balancer in my data center. To quell the rising traffic levels, it was decided to move one of the oldest customers of the company from a “highly-available” active/standby web/application server using the heartbeat [...]