5 ms·

Although nothing compared to what was in this story, you should see the level of obsolete crap in place at adult website providers. Systems that haven't change

Although nothing compared to what was in this story, you should see the level of obsolete crap in place at adult website providers. Systems that haven't changed since the 90's that still generate revenue, so they'll never be shut off until there's a flood or a 40MB hard drive finally dies.

kenko 11y ago
Have to admit, that approach makes a lot of sense to me. It's still chugging along and bringing in $, so why not just have a policy of benevolent neglect?
- nasalgoat 11y ago
  That Pentium-90 is probably sucking a ton of power at this point, when it could be virtualized and you could run 50 of those boxes on an $800 Dell pizza box. I mean, they are literally running the same hardware from the 90s.
  - wtallis 11y ago
    That Pentium 90 is a 9W processor. Even after accounting for the inefficiency of a 90's era PSU, there's not much power to be saved.
    - nasalgoat 11y ago
      Plus the hard drive(s), the space it's taking up in the DC, the cooling overhead, etc.
      - wtallis 11y ago
        There's not really any significant room for improvement on any of those factors. You might be able to save a rack unit or two, and several watts by replacing hard drives with a SSD, but if you don't have 50 boxes to consolidate, you're still facing the baseline cost of having a box taking up some amount of physical space and requiring several watts of power. Unless you make the much bigger up-front investment of migrating to a shared hosting platform.
        nasalgoat 11y ago
        When I last saw it, it was one site per tower box. So one rack held about 8-10 individual sites.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
    OK you're gonna save $X / year, how many person-hours is it going to cost you to do the move?
    - nasalgoat 11y ago
      I don't know, a couple of 8-hour days? Just to make a backup alone is worth it. Did I forget to mention none of it is documented or backed up properly?
      - dexterdog 11y ago
        But touching it could break it. Sometimes it's best to let it run its course.
        Killswitch 11y ago
        Until it dies and you start over from scratch. I am from the adult industry. They are notorious for having that "welp, server harddrive failed, need to rebuild from scratch" mentality.
        justinlardinois 11y ago
        Never quite expected these words to be typed on my keyboard, but the porn industry is something I'd like to read a tech article about.
        hga 11y ago
        I've read in passing that in times past they were web technology pioneers. Seem to remember some were using Freebsd when the canonical approach was Sun etc. big iron and UNIX(TM), and Linux was perhaps not quite yet mature enough.
        justinlardinois 11y ago
        From what I've read, the adult industry (or, more generally, the human desire to have porn) has pioneered technology in general. I can't recall the source, but I recall reading something that said that most, if not all visual media were used for porn almost immediately after their inception. I think porn is also something where your architecture only needs to just work, so that encourages cutting corners and occasionally creative solutions.
- m3rc 11y ago
  Until you're running systems that are actually too old to find anyone who will maintain them, or repair them when they inevitably break.
emidln 11y ago
I remember upgrading a bunch of this stuff in the mid to late 00s. Likely nothing that I upgraded to then modern standards using Python 2.6 and PHP 5.x has seen an update. At the time, it was actually hard to upgrade to PHP 5 or anything other than PHP 4 or Perl 5 because so many sites were using shared hosting that only support PHP4/Perl5 + MySQL.
- XorNot 11y ago
  There's a couple hundred PHP 4.4 sites running on our shared hosting. We're probably never going to upgrade them.
mml 11y ago
Did some work for a mammary related business many years ago. A periodic job was to go through "Lois'" inbox, and clean it out. It seems their payment frontend simply generated an email for the backend payment processor (Lois). Presumably, she manually keyed the cc info into a physical xon terminal to process payments. There were usually 10s of thousands of messages consisting only of credit card info sitting in the clear for months at a stretch. It was FreeBSD though, so they were cool in my book :)

kenko 11y ago

Have to admit, that approach makes a lot of sense to me. It's still chugging along and bringing in $, so why not just have a policy of benevolent neglect?

nasalgoat 11y ago
That Pentium-90 is probably sucking a ton of power at this point, when it could be virtualized and you could run 50 of those boxes on an $800 Dell pizza box. I mean, they are literally running the same hardware from the 90s.
- wtallis 11y ago
  That Pentium 90 is a 9W processor. Even after accounting for the inefficiency of a 90's era PSU, there's not much power to be saved.
  - nasalgoat 11y ago
    Plus the hard drive(s), the space it's taking up in the DC, the cooling overhead, etc.
    - wtallis 11y ago
      There's not really any significant room for improvement on any of those factors. You might be able to save a rack unit or two, and several watts by replacing hard drives with a SSD, but if you don't have 50 boxes to consolidate, you're still facing the baseline cost of having a box taking up some amount of physical space and requiring several watts of power. Unless you make the much bigger up-front investment of migrating to a shared hosting platform.
      - nasalgoat 11y ago
        When I last saw it, it was one site per tower box. So one rack held about 8-10 individual sites.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
  OK you're gonna save $X / year, how many person-hours is it going to cost you to do the move?
  - nasalgoat 11y ago
    I don't know, a couple of 8-hour days? Just to make a backup alone is worth it. Did I forget to mention none of it is documented or backed up properly?
    - dexterdog 11y ago
      But touching it could break it. Sometimes it's best to let it run its course.
      - Killswitch 11y ago
        Until it dies and you start over from scratch. I am from the adult industry. They are notorious for having that "welp, server harddrive failed, need to rebuild from scratch" mentality.
        justinlardinois 11y ago
        Never quite expected these words to be typed on my keyboard, but the porn industry is something I'd like to read a tech article about.
        hga 11y ago
        I've read in passing that in times past they were web technology pioneers. Seem to remember some were using Freebsd when the canonical approach was Sun etc. big iron and UNIX(TM), and Linux was perhaps not quite yet mature enough.
        justinlardinois 11y ago
        From what I've read, the adult industry (or, more generally, the human desire to have porn) has pioneered technology in general. I can't recall the source, but I recall reading something that said that most, if not all visual media were used for porn almost immediately after their inception. I think porn is also something where your architecture only needs to just work, so that encourages cutting corners and occasionally creative solutions.
m3rc 11y ago
Until you're running systems that are actually too old to find anyone who will maintain them, or repair them when they inevitably break.

emidln 11y ago

I remember upgrading a bunch of this stuff in the mid to late 00s. Likely nothing that I upgraded to then modern standards using Python 2.6 and PHP 5.x has seen an update. At the time, it was actually hard to upgrade to PHP 5 or anything other than PHP 4 or Perl 5 because so many sites were using shared hosting that only support PHP4/Perl5 + MySQL.

XorNot 11y ago
There's a couple hundred PHP 4.4 sites running on our shared hosting. We're probably never going to upgrade them.

mml 11y ago

Did some work for a mammary related business many years ago. A periodic job was to go through "Lois'" inbox, and clean it out. It seems their payment frontend simply generated an email for the backend payment processor (Lois). Presumably, she manually keyed the cc info into a physical xon terminal to process payments. There were usually 10s of thousands of messages consisting only of credit card info sitting in the clear for months at a stretch. It was FreeBSD though, so they were cool in my book :)