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Admin
Hey look, bailout money does something for once!
Admin
Having gone through massive mergers and coalescing of systems and seeing the ugly problems that surface along the way, I can understand their concern/trepidation at running 12 sets of systems on one powerful central system. At least they managed to save the cost of leasing and operating 11 data centers. The goal was met!
Admin
Network analyst finds a way NOT to reorganize old infrastructure.
Fixed.
Admin
Remember that geographically diverse, redundant, fault-tolerant network you used to have?
Oh, never mind, the customer is always right, and the customer won't want redundancy until after a few of those trillion dollar transfers fail to go through, the world economy grinds to a halt, and a Marxist full of empty promises and inflated currency takes the White House.
Admin
It's nice to have a happy ending periodically.
Admin
This is not a WTF, it is the only sensible way to approach this problem. It is always a bad idea to try and upgrade systems at the same time as the physical move. Instead, co-locate it all and look to rationalise it later.
As a bonus, they will have mapped every cable and connection as part of the move process and so have got that job done for free.
Admin
A WTF that ends with everything (seemingly) fine?
WTF?
Admin
That's worse than failure.
Admin
Good job. That's exactly what I was thinking the whole time.
Admin
This isn't a WTF; it's a FTW.
For The Win
Admin
It's success. It sound likes doom sometimes.
Admin
Unperturbed or undisturbed?
Admin
data processing, data data processing.
That's really all I could think of the whole time I was reading the article.
Admin
Now this is brilliant, Paula!
Admin
You can tan a hide, but you can't tan a city.
Admin
...oh, boy - you haven't worked in IT for long, have you? It was needed by a specific date, and it specifically mentions the "tangle of cables" underneath - I'm sure that they just moved those servers there, figured out some way of getting the cables from one side to the other, put the floor panels in place and breathed a sigh of relief when it actually worked.
Mapping everything and organizing the wiring would have been left for the next guy, who will start HIS article with "My first day on the job was to remove 2 of the non-essential servers, without disturbing the others..." :)
Admin
So how does colocating everything to one room get the suits their TCP/IP? IDGI.
Admin
All you whippersnappers listen up, if you talk to anyone who is the director/vp/head/manager/god of Data Processing if you pass a door that says Data Processing you need to turn around and run like hell.
After seeing that, the fell digits of "VAX" farther down were no surprise. "Data Processing" means old school proprietary unix, and we're not talking Solaris or AIX or anything updated in the last 20 years, we're talking VAX and MPE and other hellish deadend systems running on custom built hardware. All the code will be COBOL, RPG, and proprietary development environments that no one uses anymore.
We are talking the WTF motherload. No money is enough for that.
Admin
I refactor my code in exactly the same way, it looks all nice and clean in the upper levels, but underneath it's just a mangled mess.
Admin
Why would you? With old proprietary systems it's nearly impossible to do that without migrating off the systems entirely, and that is the sort of nightmare that takes years and years. He did exactly the right thing: he didn't fix what wasn't broken.
Admin
Easy... You don't actually move the mountain to the other side of the village. You move the village to the other side of the mountain.
Admin
Yea, they didn't cover that really. I imagine they hooked the whole mess up, the way it had always been, and then slapped a TCP/IP network module thingy in the "head" machine, and Voila! all better.
I've run a number of migrations off of old-school serial cable infrastructure, and it works about like that. VAX was maintained (as far as hardware) all the way until 2005(!!) so it wouldn't be challenging to buy a TCP/IP adapter for one machine, and just let the others keep doing their thing. Once you're in, you can transparently use the internal networking to communicate to the rest of the machines.
Even the scary crusty old unixes are BSD based, so you can actually graft a version of INETD into the OS as just another running process. I know Vax machines can do TCP/IP at least semi-natively; I remember working on them with TELNET in the early 90's.
Admin
They can slap something between the Internet and their communications server.
Admin
I'd turn the map 180 degrees.
Admin
Sorry, the correct answer was with a shovel and a lot of patience.
Admin
You seriously think that Obama is a Marxist? You need to get out more often (specifically, out of the US).
Admin
Or you just convince the villagers that really, they are on the best side of the mountain after all, what with all the avalanches and manbearpigs on the other side.
Admin
did you try sending a message to [email protected] DO NOT GIVE OUT MY EMAIL
Admin
varaious ftw
Admin
What do you have against the word "similar"?
Admin
Admin
/me hands whomp a copy of H2G2 (not entirely unlike Wikipedia)
Admin
You can tan but you can't hide!
Admin
Admin
If it ain't broke, don't fix it. No WTF here.
Admin
those poor businesspeople and vice president... imagine the lies that frank told them...
Admin
VMS is not any kind of UNIX. Neither is MPE.
Oh, and don't forget the modern inheritor of VMS: Windows NT. Yes, the core architecture of NT was designed by the same guy (Dave Carter) who designed the core architecture of VMS.
Admin
Thanks, Al Gore. EXCELSIOR! Whoooooooooosh.
Admin
My cousin who works as a DBA said if I come to this site and type, "My glasses do not work", then I will be recognized as an important IT worker and offered a job. I have done what is requested, pls do the needful on your end.
Admin
If you're going to be moving the village anyway, just rotate it 180 degrees. Then the mountain really is on the "other side" of the village.
Admin
Or just use a mirror.
Admin
Children these days...think they can read a few articles on Wikipedia, then pass themselves off as old-timers...
...unless he's so old the senility has eaten away what little was left of his poor addled brain.
OK, now I feel bad for mocking him.
Admin
TCP/IP integration (and Unix integration in general) on the VAXes was a lot more thorough than it is on other platforms, e.g. early versions of Windows (and maybe later versions of Windows, come to think of it). I recall using a VAX/VMS system from a Sun workstation and my desktop Linux box in 1993 (although admittedly all I used the VMS system for was its 19" color video display, and I used the Linux box because absolutely anything was better than the Windows TCP/IP stack).
Admin
I call bullshit on this story. There are VERY few banks that push 1 Trillion dollars each day. Very few. Working at a large bank myself I really doubt that any of the ones that do push that much capitol around had any problems like this.
Okay, maybe it's not bs, but just exaggerated.
Admin
Admin
Admin
[quote user="amischiefr"]Working at a large bank myself I really doubt that any of the ones that do push that much capitol around had any problems like this.quote]
How many banks need to move a capitol to the other side of a mountain?
Admin
Admin
What? BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) != AT&T UNIX(R)
UNIX predates BSD, anyway.
Admin
That's Dave Cutler.