• Anon (unregistered)

    Hey look, bailout money does something for once!

  • (cs)

    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!

  • Crafty_Shadow (unregistered)

    Network analyst finds a way NOT to reorganize old infrastructure.

    Fixed.

  • Genius (unregistered)

    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.

  • Anonymous (unregistered)

    It's nice to have a happy ending periodically.

  • TopCat (unregistered)

    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.

  • t3h (unregistered)

    A WTF that ends with everything (seemingly) fine?

    WTF?

  • Anonymous Coward (unregistered) in reply to t3h
    t3h:
    A WTF that ends with everything (seemingly) fine?

    WTF?

    That's worse than failure.

  • Buddy (unregistered)

    Good job. That's exactly what I was thinking the whole time.

  • (cs)

    This isn't a WTF; it's a FTW.

    For The Win

  • Not THAT Alex (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward:
    t3h:
    A WTF that ends with everything (seemingly) fine?

    WTF?

    That's worse than failure.

    It's success. It sound likes doom sometimes.

  • (cs)

    Unperturbed or undisturbed?

  • (cs)

    data processing, data data processing.

    That's really all I could think of the whole time I was reading the article.

  • LC314 (unregistered)

    Now this is brilliant, Paula!

  • Tenacious Developer (unregistered)

    You can tan a hide, but you can't tan a city.

  • Balentius (unregistered) in reply to TopCat
    TopCat:
    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.

    ...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..." :)

  • Dave (unregistered)

    So how does colocating everything to one room get the suits their TCP/IP? IDGI.

  • (cs)

    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.

  • IceMan (unregistered)

    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.

  • (cs) in reply to Crafty_Shadow
    Crafty_Shadow:
    Network analyst finds a way NOT to reorganize old infrastructure.

    Fixed.

    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.

  • AdT (unregistered)
    Jake Vinson:
    Ahh, a riddle question, like "how would you move a mountain to the other side of a village?"

    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.

  • (cs) in reply to Dave
    Dave:
    So how does colocating everything to one room get the suits their TCP/IP? IDGI.

    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.

  • Buddy (unregistered) in reply to Dave
    Dave:
    So how does colocating everything to one room get the suits their TCP/IP? IDGI.

    They can slap something between the Internet and their communications server.

  • Matt.C (unregistered) in reply to AdT
    AdT:
    Jake Vinson:
    Ahh, a riddle question, like "how would you move a mountain to the other side of a village?"

    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.

    I'd turn the map 180 degrees.

  • Ian (unregistered) in reply to AdT
    AdT:
    Jake Vinson:
    Ahh, a riddle question, like "how would you move a mountain to the other side of a village?"

    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.

    Sorry, the correct answer was with a shovel and a lot of patience.

  • fishbat (unregistered) in reply to Genius
    Genius:
    ... a Marxist full of empty promises and inflated currency takes the White House.

    You seriously think that Obama is a Marxist? You need to get out more often (specifically, out of the US).

  • pragmatist (unregistered) in reply to AdT
    AdT:
    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.

    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.

  • JSK (unregistered)

    did you try sending a message to [email protected] DO NOT GIVE OUT MY EMAIL

  • Winner! (unregistered)

    varaious ftw

  • whomp (unregistered)
    DECnet, which was a network protocol not too dissimilar from TCP/IP

    What do you have against the word "similar"?

  • (cs) in reply to Buddy
    Buddy:
    They can slap something between the Internet and their communications server.
    Or, you can just lie. It's not like "The Board" would know either way.
  • (cs) in reply to whomp
    whomp:
    DECnet, which was a network protocol not too dissimilar from TCP/IP

    What do you have against the word "similar"?

    /me hands whomp a copy of H2G2 (not entirely unlike Wikipedia)

  • ClaudeSuck.de (unregistered) in reply to Tenacious Developer
    Tenacious Developer:
    You can tan a hide, but you can't tan a city.

    You can tan but you can't hide!

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to AdT
    AdT:
    Jake Vinson:
    Ahh, a riddle question, like "how would you move a mountain to the other side of a village?"
    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.
    Now both the mountain and the village are in the wrong place. This has helped how exactly?
  • (cs)

    If it ain't broke, don't fix it. No WTF here.

  • iob (unregistered)

    those poor businesspeople and vice president... imagine the lies that frank told them...

  • Steve the Cynic (unregistered) in reply to Satanicpuppy
    Satanicpuppy:
    "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.

    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.

  • noob (unregistered) in reply to pragmatist
    pragmatist:
    AdT:
    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.

    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.

    Thanks, Al Gore. EXCELSIOR! Whoooooooooosh.

  • Krishna (unregistered)

    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.

  • ThingGuy McGuyThing (unregistered) in reply to AdT
    AdT:
    Jake Vinson:
    Ahh, a riddle question, like "how would you move a mountain to the other side of a village?"

    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.

    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.

  • (cs) in reply to ThingGuy McGuyThing

    Or just use a mirror.

  • Zygo (unregistered) in reply to Satanicpuppy
    Satanicpuppy:
    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.

    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.

  • Zygo (unregistered) in reply to Satanicpuppy
    Satanicpuppy:
    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.

    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).

  • (cs)

    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.

  • Pestulant (unregistered) in reply to AdT
    AdT:
    Jake Vinson:
    Ahh, a riddle question, like "how would you move a mountain to the other side of a village?"

    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.

    Or rotate the map 180 degrees ;)

  • Throatwarbler (unregistered) in reply to whomp
    What do you have against the word "similar"?
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Litotes
  • Duodecimal (unregistered) in reply to amischiefr

    [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?

  • Paula (unregistered) in reply to LC314
    LC314:
    Now this is brilliant, Paula!
    You mispelled "brillant".
  • (cs) in reply to Satanicpuppy
    Satanicpuppy:
    Even the scary crusty old unixes are BSD based,

    What? BSD (Berkeley Software Distribution) != AT&T UNIX(R)

    UNIX predates BSD, anyway.

  • (cs) in reply to Steve the Cynic
    Steve the Cynic:

    Yes, the core architecture of NT was designed by the same guy (Dave Carter) who designed the core architecture of VMS.

    That's Dave Cutler.

Leave a comment on “A Systematic Approach”

Log In or post as a guest

Replying to comment #272168:

« Return to Article