3 ms·
This reminds me of my old workplace. Government owned company where everything was running on MS Excel, SAP, fax machines [0] and prayers from operative IT offi
by bierjunge 5y ago
This reminds me of my old workplace. Government owned company where everything was running on MS Excel, SAP, fax machines [0] and prayers from operative IT office.
I had to go to one of the more "exotic" server rooms, placed in a basement and saw a very old desktop stuffed on the bottom of a rack. Covered with dust, open side panels, plastic turned yellow, you know how old and forgotten hardware looks like. This had a new-ish post-it with the message: "this runs all of the fax infrastructure. you turn it off, you explain it to the CEO".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fax https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fax
- robbedpeter 5y agoI worked for a company that had acquired a B-list, top 20 mmorpg - its database was mssql and had been running 24/7 for 5 years, with no way to back it up, no safety net, and an increasingly pissed off player community suffering degrading service. Everyone was terrified to reboot. They started bouncing paychecks before I got to see the drama come to a head, but I'm obsessive about proper levels of redundancy anymore. Don't build fragility into a system, and at least leave yourself a means to fail gracefully.