4 ms·

Has no one here seen: https://www.reddit.com/r/cablefail/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cablefail/ There are 1000s of these pictures. The entire world's IT infras

Has no one here seen: https://www.reddit.com/r/cablefail/ https://www.reddit.com/r/cablefail/ There are 1000s of these pictures. The entire world's IT infrastructure has been held together with spaghetti-noodle-cabling and bodged patches for over three decades now. I'm even guilty of it. Most IT guys are guilty of it. Don't even get me started talking about how bodged together corporate codebases are. Banks are perhaps the worst offenders. Old hardware running with bandaids and bubblegum. Software that more than 5 different teams have had their fingers in, mucking about, and some codebases have orders of magnitude more than that. Anyone that didn't know this, doesn't pay attention, or just started internetting.

jl6 5y ago
> Don't even get me started talking about how bodged together corporate codebases are. Banks are perhaps the worst offenders. Old hardware running with bandaids and bubblegum. Software that more than 5 different teams have had their fingers in, mucking about, and some codebases have orders of magnitude more than that. And yet, perhaps counterintuitively, the main downside of such systems is that they are slow and expensive to change, not that they are unreliable.
- dragonwriter 5y ago
  > And yet, perhaps counterintuitively, the main downside of such systems is that they are slow and expensive to change, not that they are unreliable. They are slow and expensive to change because they are maintained because they have been, at great expense and cost in both failures and remediation efforts, made tolerably reliable (but still extremely fragile) so long as things are exactly within certain expectations (which often have been narrowed from the intended design based on observed bugs that have been deemed too expensive to fix), and it is inordinately difficult to modify them without causing them to revert to a state of intolerable unreliability. They are systems that generations have been spent reshaping business operations around their bugs to make them “reliable”.
charcircuit 5y ago
How "pretty" your cable routing is doesn't effect performance / reliability.
- SahAssar 5y ago
  Pretty in this context mostly means predictable, which does have an effect. If you are called to fix a broken connection and you get a rats nest it will take a lot longer and might impact other users.
cgh 5y ago
I had a friend who worked in IT in a major Canadian bank some years back. He said they’d lost the source code (Cobol, I would imagine) for certain jobs and had taken to editing the binaries directly with a hex editor.
SahAssar 5y ago
If you haven't read it https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks beautifully describes this and has both made me want to quit and start a farm and want to stay and improve things depending on the day. If you (the collective you, everyone reading this) haven't, read it.
walrus01 5y ago
Have literally seen major things taken out because somebody tripped over the $5 power strip to the sole authoritative nameserver and nobody realized/cared for years that the authoritative ns2/ns3 weren't really receiving zone transfers.

jl6 5y ago

> Don't even get me started talking about how bodged together corporate codebases are. Banks are perhaps the worst offenders. Old hardware running with bandaids and bubblegum. Software that more than 5 different teams have had their fingers in, mucking about, and some codebases have orders of magnitude more than that. And yet, perhaps counterintuitively, the main downside of such systems is that they are slow and expensive to change, not that they are unreliable.

dragonwriter 5y ago
> And yet, perhaps counterintuitively, the main downside of such systems is that they are slow and expensive to change, not that they are unreliable. They are slow and expensive to change because they are maintained because they have been, at great expense and cost in both failures and remediation efforts, made tolerably reliable (but still extremely fragile) so long as things are exactly within certain expectations (which often have been narrowed from the intended design based on observed bugs that have been deemed too expensive to fix), and it is inordinately difficult to modify them without causing them to revert to a state of intolerable unreliability. They are systems that generations have been spent reshaping business operations around their bugs to make them “reliable”.

charcircuit 5y ago

How "pretty" your cable routing is doesn't effect performance / reliability.

SahAssar 5y ago
Pretty in this context mostly means predictable, which does have an effect. If you are called to fix a broken connection and you get a rats nest it will take a lot longer and might impact other users.

cgh 5y ago

I had a friend who worked in IT in a major Canadian bank some years back. He said they’d lost the source code (Cobol, I would imagine) for certain jobs and had taken to editing the binaries directly with a hex editor.

SahAssar 5y ago

If you haven't read it https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks https://www.stilldrinking.org/programming-sucks beautifully describes this and has both made me want to quit and start a farm and want to stay and improve things depending on the day. If you (the collective you, everyone reading this) haven't, read it.

walrus01 5y ago

Have literally seen major things taken out because somebody tripped over the $5 power strip to the sole authoritative nameserver and nobody realized/cared for years that the authoritative ns2/ns3 weren't really receiving zone transfers.