Posts by neilo

Re: Improvement?

You can buy new MS-DOS compatible hardware here: https://nixsys.com/legacy-computers/ms-dos-computers

They also sell built Windows 98 machines etc.

There's a world of difference between "the email stopped working for a day" and "you assholes fucked up so bad that all my emails have been stolen by a 3rd party".

As a former Rackspace customer caught up in this very mess, I'm happy to see the lawsuits taking aim at this.

Re: "Rackspace has recovered all of the PST files on the compromised servers"

My understanding is that they are doing some sort of automated extraction. It can be done… but it ain’t fast, and if the database is corrupted it won’t be 100% accurate either.

The contempt Rackspace has shown for customers is unbelievable. Yesterday, for the first time since this dumpster fire was lit, I received an email from Rackspace telling my that pst files may soon be available, but it may only be a partial recovery.

What. A. Joke.

Rackspace is dead to me now. I managed to recover > 95% of emails and moved on.

Re: So where are the backups?

Many years ago, I worked at a company who had set up shiny new VM Ware systems and a huge (for the day) SAN. Exchange 2008 (I think) had been spun up and the Exchange 2003 migration was happening as expected: completely transparently and seamlessly. Until, of course, it didn't: the new drive for the mailbox database hadn't been provisioned big enough, and the transfer (and server) fell over. "Don't worry," said our new hire who brandished his Microsoft certifications, "I can deal with this". And off into the server room he strode.

"FUCK!!!!!!" came the scream a few minutes later. Instead of expanding the drive, a very simple process in VM Ware, he had accidentally deleted the mailstore drive. Now we were in trouble: email was not flowing because the old 2003 server was in the process of being decommissioned, and maybe 50% of the mailboxes had been transferred to the new (now deleted) system and were gone from the 2003 mailstore. Backups were not yet running on the new system, as the tape library was still being set up.

It fell to me to spend the weekend restoring the old mailstore from 2003 backup tapes and get that system running again, as our new hire had prior commitments over the weekend (and out IT manager didn't trust him alone with the systems now). It took the weekend, but the 2003 Exchange was up and running with the loss of several days email, then we transferred operations to the new server.

All in all, a process I never want to experience again.

Re: Complete incompetence

“ After setting up your new mailbox, you have to wait up to 24-48 hours for the changes to propagate across the Internet. ”

I spun up my own M365 instance, because after this I’m done with Rackspace. The DNS has been the absolute worst thing about this entire nightmare. Normally, when I’m changing mailservers I’ll adjust the DNS TTL from the normal 48 hours to 5 minutes a week ahead of time and do the cutover & mail transfer when I know the risk of in-flight email being misrouted is very low.

Because of this shitshow, I’ve no idea how many emails have been lost whilst I waited for the update to propagate. It’s now a three days afterwards , and mail flow looks about right.

Reconstruction of email archives has been problematic, but I’m almost there.

Patience is indeed the key here, and understanding that we are now minimizing the data loss, as opposed to a successful migration.

Re: we can dream

Why do you feel that MS will use it's old EEE tricks today?

Microsoft has no real interest in desktop OSs - the mess that Windows 11 is being the obvious indicator of that. Microsoft today is all about cloud-hosted and browser-agnostic. I'm currently using Dynamics 365 in Safari on my MacBook Pro and it's just as good as Edge on a Windows machine.

There are plenty of reasons to dislike systemd; attributing old Gales / Ballmer era behaviors of Microsoft is hardly one of them.

Re: Something of a nitpick

It's not a nit-pick; it's a fundamental point to the whole thing. Musk's self-aggrandizing and reality-bending needs to be called out.

Re: "Oops, did we forget to mention that bit?"

Closely followed by the discovery that the much-ballyhooed memory technology is slow, inefficient junk that needs a bigger heatsink than an NVidia GPU.

Re: Inflation hedge

How is cryptocurrency in any way of fixed supply? Spinning up a new crypto is ludicrously easy; there are several YouTube videos just on that. And of course people use real-world assets to fund their crypto; the only people who didn't do that were the one setting up this Ponzi scheme in the first place.

You asked: but does it actually do much more than a 2001 iMac?

More? Hard to say. Does it do it better and faster? Absolutely. Video editing is a breeze. Audio editing is a breeze. In every aspect, the M1 Macs are simply a better experience of a 2001 PowerPC iMac.

Re: Scope Creep

My thoughts exactly. If there are new requirements, you add the time for those requirements onto the project timeline. Any extra time in the project timeline is there for existing functional testing issues to be reported and resolved.

Re: Wall Street?

"I'd be more impressed with block chain if its supporters could demonstrate even one beneficial use."

To be clear, I am not a crypto supporter in any way. But the blockchain concept I can see having uses in logistics. As goods move from manufacturers through distributors to retailers, I can see a blockchain that tracks the movements of specific good. Tie the goods to something important at the manufacturing stage - say, the lot id - then dealing with product recalls, food contamination etc. suddenly becomes a lot simpler, because the movements of goods are in the blockchain.

Is it worthwhile? I don't know. Society seems to be fine with 20,000 pounds of ground beef being recalled and destroyed, so maybe the economic costs involved aren't worth it.

But I do see this as a good use-case for blockchain technology.

Re: Rule 1 for SAP

This is true for any ERP, though. A new ERP with new processes and functionality is a business-transformative event. It's not like installing the latest version of Word.

Many years ago, I worked on a site where the ERP system (Dynamics AX 4) had been extensively modified to run like its predecessor (SAGE Line 100). It was, predictably, full of bugs and awkward work-arounds. Naturally, the users hated this Dynamics AX 4 thing.

Re: What a cowardly little shit.

Go and watch the video, then come back here.

What makes this sickening is this:

1. He assured people he wasn't going to cry this time

2. He's doing this a few weeks before Christmas / new year, making it very hard for people to find new jobs fast

3. He did this after receiving almost a billion-dollar cash infusion.

Other comments he's made about his employees shows he's a slime-ball.

As for doing it to 900 people at once over a zoom call, surely it would be better for their managers to have simultaneous meetings to deliver the news to smaller groups. How he did it was cold.

Finally, and as others have said, companies demand a two-week notice period, yet fire 900 people on the spot like this. This CEO sack-of-slime has just tole the remaining employees how much notice the company is willing to tolerate, and this will backfire badly.

Re: buy gold now

Under what circumstances do you feel that French agents entering the harbor of a peaceful nation they are not at war with, sinking an unarmed boa and murdering those on boardt is remotely justified?

France committed an act of war against New Zealand that day. That NZ did not retaliate is due to the level-headedness of that country's government.

There are things to admire about Greenpeace, and things to despise. Neither justifies murder.

Re: Bean counters?

BetaCam and BetaMAX have practically nothing in common, except that the name starts with “Beta” and both come from Sony. BetsMAX looked better because of the ringing added to areas of high contrast which gave the impression of higher detail on the screen.

Re: This was noticed by potential customers

Dynamics 365 is a mess, in terms of how the various technologies are being welded together. Once the factions within Microsoft can agree on a common data structure things will improve.

On-prem Dynamics 365 is possible... but you don't want to do it. Literally the first line in the on-prem plan is "implement Azure in your datacenter". And even assuming you have the horsepower to do that AND get D365 up and running, you **still* need Azure service bus to make things work, and you **still** need Microsoft Azure-hosted dev systems. So you can go down the expensive Azure approach, or go down the monumentally expensive on-prem approach.

Re: ERP == Enterprise Reduction Programme

A couple of things you forgot to add to your list: "sacrifice a virgin at midnight on the day before switch-over" and "hope like hell".

There's always that. But nothing beats a dress rehearsal run a few days before the actual go-live.

I was involved in a client rescue a few years back. They had implemented AX2012 with a vast swath of customizations that sorta-kinda worked ok, but they never wanted to test the data migration code. They assured us that their code was perfect. So come the go-live, and their system starts spitting out JSON files the size you've never seen before. The AX code groaned under the load, but dutifully processed the data. As you might have guessed, their data was wrong, and every single journal and customer state they shipped in had issues.

Every. Single. One.

So rather than abort the go-live, they decided to press on, and thus began the cleanup work. A year later, the original team started to break up for varying reasons, and I was brought in to keep going with the cleanup. That's the we discovered that not only was there bad data screwing up current transactions, there was bad code writing vast amounts of junk to the database causing further problems.

The remediation work took another six months, until the new CFO of the company in question said to his finance team to just journal out whatever the issues were and move forwards. We got the system mostly debugged, but by then the company, which had been acquired by a much larger company, decided to break away and found a new partner to continue with.

Our PM didn't stand up to the customer PM enough to demand go-live testing. And this was the result. For want on 30 minutes of go-live testing, the entire project and customer was lost.

Re: Why

And even that is small potatoes compared to the deeper problem with those databases: record size. A lot of the tables in those systems are close to (or at) their maximum record size. Inserting another 2 characters is simply not possible.

And even if you could simply insert another two characters, there is an unknown amount of code that parses the records starting at the nth character... all of that code would have to be examined and tested.

Resizing database columns would be a painful couple of days. Full regression testing of some of these systems? Weeks and weeks.

"Our employees are key to achieving our goals and aspirations"

You know, I'm sure I heard that before somewhere... Maybe when Mikey and Jo were talking about the CLEAR values during the initial induction and yearly refreshers. Nah; couldn't have been them, could it? That would mean they were saying thing they didn't actually believe in.

But to the point here, show me a CEO who doesn't, with a straight face, say exactly this.

I'm surprised he is even continuing with "digital transformation" as a phrase. Why not go back in time and talk about reengineering the company? I mean, "Reengineering the Corporation" started with (then) CSC. Why not dust off that concept and try to sell it again?

Re: his pedigree

Exactly: Accenture. From reading, it seems like he was a hatchet man there, laying off vast swathes of employees and offshoring whatever he could.

This guy is no savior for DXC.

Re: Thanks from the missus

... it would be delicious if she ends up contracting for DXC ...

Do not, under any circumstances, become a DXC contractor.

Contractors get royally fucked every possible way. Note that, in the US at least, contractor invoices are paid 90 days after the invoice due date.

So consider this: She's finished up with DXC as an employee, and has lined up contracting work with the client on behalf of DXC. She does her first week of work, dutifully invoices DXC, and won't see that money for several months.

Avoid DXC. Just don't do anything for them. They are a toxic cesspool the fucks anyone and everyone over. Contract to the client directly if possible. And the client will be better off without DXC anyway.