First of all, I was a trainee. I do not know if that ever even entered production use. Secondly, the problem the web application was intended to solve was reall

First of all, I was a trainee. I do not know if that ever even entered production use. Secondly, the problem the web application was intended to solve was really trivial: Service managers used it to register customer machines that were intended to send email; they would enter the IP address of the server, the DNS domain of the sender and the account number of the customer to bill. The web application validated the data (fairly crudely - the spec I was given defined an account number as "consisting of decimal digits", and an email address as "containing an @-sign"), entered it into a database and sent an email to the firewall team so they would adjust their rule sets. Me and my supervisor looked at that loop intensely, and there was no explanation we could come up with why it would even be there in the first place. (The whole thing was less than a thousand lines of not-very-dense Perl code, plus a few hundred lines of HTML templates. It's not like this was some highly complex piece of code.)