The Byzantine Generals Problem

Symptom A node in your cluster is not down. It is worse than down. Its disk is returning corrupted blocks that pass the checksum because the checksum is corrupted too. Or a NIC with a firmware bug is duplicating and reordering frames. Or a bad memory module flipped a bit in a config value and the node now believes it owns a shard it does not. Or someone has root on one machine. ...

Rice's Theorem

Symptom The security team asks for a scanner with no false positives and no false negatives. Every piece of malware caught, nothing legitimate quarantined. The platform team asks whether the analyzer can flag every function that performs I/O, so the pure ones can be cached automatically. ...