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Admin
"These offices were tied together through VPNs, leased lines, hard lines, and probably tin cans with a string."
Nice one!!!
Admin
Pretty sure I have a better setup in my home network, after all, my server works off a Pentium III!
Admin
Admin
I've had enough problems doing server migrations in medical offices where there were those "oh, yeah, the server handles that too - why didn't you move it?!?!"...
Backup utilities that assume the server is only running their application and hangs/crashes randomly if you have any other database installed, screwball install programs, storing database configuration information in the database you connect to, so you have to change additional configurations after moving the database or it stops working, using CSV files as a database and never rotating those CSV files (guess how long it takes to do a select() on a CSV file with 15000 rows using ODBC on a desktop with 256 MB of RAM).
But yeah, that takes the cake. NT4. Everywhere.
Sad thing is, I'd work a contract to update that mess - or at least document it. Guess I'm a masochist.
Admin
I can only imagine what the Daylight Saving Time changes did to an office like this!! (The perils of using old, unsupported software on vital servers!)
Admin
It's a fascinating war story, but I don't see much of a WTF here. The technology, the configuration, and even the management process were all more-or-less SOP when NT4 was the hot new server operating system. It's not really even a WTF that nobody upgraded. If all the servers are providing task-oriented functions, there's no need to fix what ain't broken. Certainly no office is going to budget to fix a system that still works. I guess the WTF is that Central IT isn't funding an upgrade program to simplify their own support tasks.
Admin
Due to budget cuts, this comment has been delayed until 2010.
Admin
I have no idea WTF that business with the asterisk was supposed to mean. You put an asterisk at the end of word, that means there's a footnote. Where's the bloody footnote?
Admin
Well, you did have to read the next two sentences before it made sense. I can see that might have been tricky.
Admin
Yet the government (assuming US here) has $$$$ to send Billion$ and Billion$ to banks.
Admin
Why is there an asterisk and no footnote?
Admin
I'll agree that it was confusing, but here you go:
Admin
The light at the end of the tunnel has been turned off due to budget cuts.
Admin
Admin
That doesn't surprise me, as it's actually the same condition I have to work in the army everyday: one of my company's tasks is supporting a whole army corps HQ and many of its units, which usually means re-installing Windows XP, cleaning viruses, salvaging data from aging HDs and sometimes de-soldering bad caps from mobos.
Also, we try assembling working PCs from the guts and remains of other incoming boxes. PCI videocards, ISA network adapters and Slot 7 mobos coupled with 2 GB HDs are not uncommon.
The range of hardware I have to work with ranges from first-gen Slot-7 Pentiums with 64 MB RAM (the absolute minimum for installing XP, which surprisingly is pretty usable with Office XP and some services disables), to Pentium 2-3 with 128-256 MB RAM, while Pentium 4 or Core processors are considered a luxury. Anything with more than 192 MB of RAM (or NOT using SDRAM) is also considered a luxury.
Admin
You can install IIS PWS on the server version - you have Workstation installed and then perform an "upgrade" on the OS to the server version.
Admin
How about the ancient, unsupported servers running unknown software that cannot be updated and isn't even sort of standardised?
You'd be hard pressed to buy a Dell desktop with only 256M of RAM today, and 7 year old hardware is just waiting to fail - better to replace the boxes with standardised configs over a period of a couple months, keeping the decommissioned hardware for a year in case you miss a magic script that must be run at the end of year or whatever.
From the looks of things, Central IT isn't supporting these boxes at all, probably because (WTF 2) they don't have enough money to do their job. Maybe it's not WTF level, but it is boneheaded and shortsighted.
Admin
An image of a machine of this class could easily have been taken and run in VMWare for configuration-change testing.
Want to install SMTP Services ? If the SMTP port is free (and Exchange is not working), install an API and Registry Spy and figure out how SMTP Services determines that Exchange is present, and force the result to be false by removing the diagnostic causes. If SMTP Services and Exchange are too closely coupled for one to work well with the body pats of the other strewn around just install any of the myriad of free SMTP servers, including those that run on Cygwin.
PWS: Bring back all of the states to a configuration format that you control, wipe the installation, deploy IIS, redeploy the configuration in an expected format. Do that in a VMWare image until you get it right, then deploy. PWS wasn't exactly a complicated engine anyway.
I think Massimo gave up waaaaay too easily here.
Admin
A couple years ago I was involved in the development of some sort of client software for insurance brokers. Quite a few times I went to help the beta testers install it, and very often they had 10 year old computers running Windows 98 (if not worse) on 128M, with nice flickering 15" CRT. Obviously our software couldn't work on that kind of crapware, and that has been a major impediment for the project. I didn't have a look at their servers but it mustn't have been much prettier.
I asked them if it wasn't too painful to work on those, and indeed, they probably lost a couple hours of productivity every day because of that. That wouldn't be that big a deal if they had third world type wages, but this was in Paris, France, where labor is very expensive; you'd think that bean counters could have figured that saving an hour or so of an employee's daily labour could be worth investing €400 in a brand new cheap-o Dell. But no. Idjits.
Oh and the worst offender (my luser had a vintage '98 Dell) was located right next to the Opéra, where a month's rent for a closet's worth of office space probably costs as much as a couple high end workstations with triple 30" monitors.
They all had nice leather chairs, though.
Admin
well, I commend you for being so resourceful and making do with the tools that you have.
Admin
Well, maybe not a WTF, but the CF (Creepiness Factor) was way off the scale. My skin crawled reading about the description of that mess.
Admin
That's what she said.
Admin
This worries me. We wonder why our militaries are having such a tough time in Iraq and Afghanistan - maybe this is why.
There's nothing wrong with old hardware - but it should be old RELIABLE hardware. And there's not too much wrong with Windows XP per se, but if it's getting viruses, then the users and admins are doing something wrong.
In the army, "Fatal Error" really could mean that. They should sort out their IT.
Admin
Servers with 256MB RAM? Hey, that's twice the amount on my iPod.
Admin
Standardization is great for the Central IT department, but it doesn't do the the users any good that they can see. If they open their spreadsheet, does it open? If they send email, does it get sent? If yes, then why standardize? Why upgrade?
Eventually something will happen to force the issue, but until then, maintaining the system is the IT department's problem. How many government (or large corporate) applications still think they're talking to IBM block-mode terminals? How many web servers are screen-scraping a block-mode interface to populate the fields of a database? This government agency could be running their ancient apps in VMWare Unity for decades...
Admin
What I'd have done is not TOUCHED that crapfest, and instead redirected the firewalls / switches (hoping to heck they support this) to redirect all port 25 traffic to the node designated as a mail relay. That way you don't risk upsetting the delicate house of cards that you've got in this sort of environment.
Admin
Admin
Sure. In a perfect world. Still, it would take just a week short of forever to do all of that for all the cases he was looking at. But yes, every armchair-network-administrator has that exact same magic wand.
Or were you kidding?
Admin
So what, they're some 12 years behind on IT. Keeps it in line with the rest of their administration. Imagine what would happen if the government would be efficient suddenly?
Admin
I'm the same Massimo involved in the cluster nightmare of some articles ago... but this time I actually appreciated Alex's editing ;-)
The whole thing happened in 2005; I hope something got better in the meantime, but I'm not so sure it did. I worked for a company which did consulting for this agency (where, I can assure, this one was definitely not the only WTF I saw...), and they sent me to shred some light on the Big Mail Relay Project; after some assessment and lab testing, it became quite clear it was actually impossible to make that mess work under the conditions required by the customer, so we declined the job.
While heavily banging my head on the table (but having not surrendered yet), I posted in the microsoft.public.exchange.admin newsgroup asking for some help, and describing what awful mess I had uncovered. Then, a couple of years later, I started reading The Daily WTF, and submitted the original newsgroup post to alex... which took quite a while to publish it, but this time did definitely a good job in turning it into a TDWTF article :-)
Original post (and resulting thread) here: http://groups.google.it/group/microsoft.public.exchange.admin/browse_thread/thread/1aa56ce9d6bf75c8
Admin
Don't think so. The comma is part of the "should be" sentence, it doesn't have anything to do with the internal "of". I've seen lots of people use commas that way, but still it doesn't mae any sense.
Example:
I've read "should be of not or", and it is incorrect. I've read "should be of not or," and it is incorrect.
What exactly have the comma to do with the quoted phrase? nothing. So, why should it be put inside the quotation marks?
Admin
Of course, sometimes investment in technology brings returns, both in gerater productivity and lower costs for administration, but there's only so much you can do.
In any large corporation (where "large" is "occupies more than a few floors of a building", not just "spread over an entire country or two") the term "SOP" needs to include "has heterogenous configuation" - otherwise known as noone uses the same version of anythign at all, but it still has to work.Anyway, if they had a centralised upgrade plan and everyone was on a well-maintained state-of-the-art system with no deficiencies, we'ld be reading the WTF of a corporation where every request for an upgrade has to go through The Process Of Doom in order to be approved and some developer can't understand why their request for an oddball setup is considered so difficult.
Some people are never happy.
Admin
Exactly. I used to work in a small software team in a mostly non-software company, and we always took our desktop systems out from under corporate IT and ran our own server because it was the only way to meet our unique needs.
I'm not saying every-department-for-itself is a good situation, but it's certainly a normal and common situation. It's often a response to a central IT department (known as Data Processing in the early days) not being responsive to the end users.
If it goes on too long, it does eventually become a huge problem. Governments and government contractors are especially prone to letting it go on because accounting methods make it hard for both to capitalize the cost of the upgrade.
Admin
Geeks think that the DNA is actually constructed of ones and zeros. If it doesn't happen in sub second timeframe then it is a WTF. Sadly, the real WTF is that some geek would spend their Friday night with their joy stick in one hand and pizza in the other (because they are so intelligent that they forgot to eat properly or exercise) tapping out an article for WTF hoarding their money away so they can buy the latest gadget that propels them further into the star wars/matrix world that allows them to avoid a reality they are incapable of handling.
An embarrassment to mankind. Harden the #$%^* up.
Admin
Thank you. This needed to be said. Only if it was to redefine the baseline for arrogance and cluelessness.
Admin
Thank you for that insightful post. Why exactly are you here?
Admin
Sorry pal, I think our job involves clarifying what happens in that dark box with the pixies and the fairies and all the magical wizardry. Not give up and hope that it keeps working. Why would people hire us for that ?
It's not working. That's why someone is hired to fix it.
So fix it.
Admin
Because that's how punctuation works in the English language. A comma has to go inside the quotation, the context does not matter. The same holds true for the period, with the exception of quotes with references in brackets, like this: According to my grammar book, "this is how you should do it" (123).
Admin
to shake you awake ... you know, like your mum has to every morning.
Admin
Both "should be or of not or" and "should be of not or," are incorrect. Trivial. Both phrases are meaningless.
If you really feel the need to quote either (a) a TV evangelist or (b) a back-brain moron who comes up with a phrase like "should be or not of or" (optional comma), then perhaps you'd like to consider an alternative occupation as an amoeba. They're fairly harmless. At least one religion thinks that you're heading that way on the great circle of life in any case.
Admin
Both can be correct. Do whatever enhances clarity. We're talking about English, not C. From my hazy memory of university, punctuation inside quotes is typically used in American English while punctuation outside is generally from The Queen's.
S&W's The Elements of Style sez:
"Typographical usage dictates that the comma be inside the marks, though logically it often seems not to belong there.
'The Fish,' 'Poetry,' and 'The Monkeys' are in Marianne Moore's Selected Poems."
Hardly a ringing endorsement of the inside the quotes argument.
Also, when discussing technical matters it often confuses things to leave punctuation inside the quotes.
"To get a listing of the previous directory's contents type 'ls ..'."
That example is a bit forced, but hopefully you get the idea.
Moral of the story: putting the punctuation outside of the quotes is perfectly acceptable, especially in a technical forum like thedailywtf.com's comments.
Admin
I'm really impressed by the 10 milli-bit/sec speed of the connections. Perhaps they should upgrade the tin-can and strings to twisted pair strings and aluminum cans!
Admin
Where did I say "don't fix it"?
Nowhere.
There is a right way and a wrong way to fix it.
The wrong way is to randomly lay about it with an API monitor and attempt to infer what's going on inside a very complex and proprietary undocumented black-box process, hacking out whatever random bits of registry or filing system happen to catch your eye and look like they might be relevant.
The right way is to go RTFM. There are numerous pages on MSDN that give you full step by step instructions on how to grub out the leftover bits of a bollixed exchange server installation. That is the simplest, easiest, correctest, quickest, most non-empirical way to fix it.
The faulty logic was in your "Either do it this way or don't do it at all" false dilemma. I wasn't saying "Don't fix it". I was saying "Don't be a cowboy".
We are, after all, professionals.
Admin
I doubt it. Our problems in the sandbox are largely due to an idjit CinC fighting 2 wars instead of 1. IT like that sucks, but it doesn't compare to a nasty error like invading Iraq.
No, you really only have to lock down and standardize the infrastructure; desktops can be given looser rules, and there is a difference between maintaining email on a single version (or DBs for that matter) and forbidding anything not on a standard list.
Admin
Admin
This.
Admin
Admin
AFAIK that's only in "US English": Real English allows the full stop and comma outside of quotes, unless it is quoting what someone said. Blindly including the period inside quotes can lead to problems.
The best example I can think of is editing DNS zone files: if you include the FQDN you need to include a dot on the end otherwise you'll end up with hostname.example.com.example.com - something I've seen in more than one place. Some HOWTOs I've seen don't make it clear when explaining it like 'now type "hostname.example.com."'
Admin
Your willingness to accept without questions the KB articles from MSDN is a very dangerous idea, especially when it comes to NT 4.0-era installations (besides I challenge you to find a good article from that era, MSDN was atrocious back then). As a dev you should be more than just a recipe implementer. Being professional requires a questioning mind.
See, my professionalism is much bigger than yours.
Besides, I don't see what the big risk is in doing those trials in VMWare.
Admin
192MB? My graphics card has more ram than that! My old phone had 64MB. My old semi-retired linux box has 512MB. My new (1yr old) machine has 8GB.
Even this pathetic machine I have at work has 1GB.