Re: Florida1920 Re: Said server was a Dell PowerEdge 1300.......
"....With hardware that old....." Ah, you must have missed the fun of Y2K? The following would be a quite typical conversation about a "problem" system in the lead up to December 31st 1999, usually in the swanky offices of some major City financial firm:
ME: "So, how long has this bit of code been in operation?"
CLIENT: "Oh, we think it was placed in production around 1983. We're not sure because we can't find the original PO or any of the original project documentation."
ME: "How about the product's documentation?"
CLIENT: "No, not sure if there ever was any."
ME: "How much code and are there any comments in the code?"
CLIENT: "There's just over six-hundred-thousand lines of code but no comments."
ME: "OK, how about the original project team?"
CLIENT: "Well, the CIO from the day retired to Spain about ten years ago; the IT manager is dead; and we have no idea who wrote the COBOL code."
ME: "So, if you don't have any documentation, how do you run it?"
CLIENT: "Well, we have a few bits written down by the sysadmins over the years...."
ME: "And the server itself?"
CLIENT: "That's the original VAX we bought for it in 1983."
ME: "And this system is core to your business, you have no manual backup process to replace it, and no idea if it will survive the date change at midnight on the 31st December? And you waited until three months before Y2K to call us?"
CLIENT: "Er, yes."
Biting the hand that feeds IT
