• ceiswyn (unregistered) in reply to littlebobbytables
    littlebobbytables:
    Most terminal diseases are better than Sourcesafe.

    They might kill me, but at least they won't corrupt my blimmin' PDFs.

  • Vladimir (unregistered) in reply to deejayvee
    deejayvee:
    SteamBoat:
    A dork is a whale penis.

    Why do whales get a special name for their penis? Does any other animal? Are whales like insecure human men who name their penises?

    Dork.
  • wingcommander (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Anonymous:
    Duct tape: heat resistant tape specifically designed for ducting and other high-heat applications.

    Duck tape: magic universal waterproof anything fixer.

    Get it right guys, you don't want end up with duct tape when you really need some duck tape.

    In a hardware store- once saw Duck brand Duct tape. Had a duck on the label and everything.

  • (cs) in reply to Владмир
    Владмир:
    What could possibly have been going through their heads, that they thought that after replacing SVN with eSCM, and not using eSCM, and after all the fussing everyone went through that they had to label eSCM as business critical to use it, they completely forgot about SVN and used a zip file with a spreadsheet after they dumped eSCM. That just screams WTF!

    My take on what happened is that the consultant couldn't find anything else wrong in that place except for lack version control for SQL (snippets?) and (shell?) scripts. Then he decided to make an elephant out a fly. Or the SVN guys did want to have that kind of stuff in their system.

    As for the consultant not reacting to e-mail and some random guys not knowing that he is gone: the outfit described seems to be large and a lot of consultants do not react to any e-mails from people whose complaints will be considered insignificant by the consultant's corporate stakeholder.

  • (cs)

    Justin and Brian. Hmmm... Didn't they used to be on the US version of Queer as Folk?

  • Hired Gun (unregistered)

    This one definitely requires seeing both sides of before judging.

    The "prima donna" consultant is the first thing to wonder about. Consultants are usually brought in when upper management believes that production has either become less than productive, or when middle management is suspected of incompetence.

    In this case, seeing as how they ended up with the ZIP file solution, I'm betting there was a strong chance of #2 being the case.

    The "Insisting on" of the window office and coffee maker may well have been part of his requirements. I've worked as a consultant for a long time, and I've learned that if you let them treat you like dirt, you will have no credibility. I don't insist on an individual coffee maker, but I can understand the office. I wouldn't demand a window office, but I don't work on a cardboard box, either. As for the Internet - I have seen some absolutely ridiculous lock-downs by admins in the past. At one location I ended up having to use a Verizon cell phone tethered on a laptop just to get email. Again, not knowing the specifics, I won't be part of the mob.

    I worked at one location where the (only) server was on top of a cardboard box so that it could hold up the counter where the coffee maker was because the counter's support had broken out. They had 100+ external employees pulling their assignments off of it through a 384 kBps DSL, and no one there saw any problem with it. The external employees most certainly did, however. I got stuck on a broken particle board desk in the corner of the conference room.

    Lo and behold, first week on the job: The coffee pot is dropped. The server dies (smoke and everything), and all seems lost. I watched the IT guy (who gave me my lovely accommodations) completely flip out and storm off while I sat quietly. After he salvaged the tape drive from the server and put it in his machine, he found his backups hadn't run in months.

    I said nothing. After all, I was there to develop, not administer servers. No one thought to ask me, either.

    After an hour or so, he was told to go home. The owner came to me and asked what could be done. I had just two hours prior finished mirroring their "environment" (for lack of a better term) to a VM on my dev machine to start testing.

    I told him I would need the (former) IT director's office "for the hardware" as it had just become obvious the break room was not working well as a server facility. Two firewall changes and a fixed IP address on the VM later, and they were rolling again. Built them a new server the next day, and put it in the office. Installed, configured, and TESTED a tape backup solution, and all was well.

    For what it's worth, that IT director was doing the "ZIP file with the date as the filename" VCS, too.

    It's all in the point-of-view, I suppose.

  • (cs) in reply to Hired Gun
    Hired Gun:
    This one definitely requires seeing both sides of before judging.

    The "prima donna" consultant is the first thing to wonder about. Consultants are usually brought in when upper management believes that production has either become less than productive, or when middle management is suspected of incompetence.

    In this case, seeing as how they ended up with the ZIP file solution, I'm betting there was a strong chance of #2 being the case.

    The "Insisting on" of the window office and coffee maker may well have been part of his requirements. I've worked as a consultant for a long time, and I've learned that if you let them treat you like dirt, you will have no credibility. I don't insist on an individual coffee maker, but I can understand the office. I wouldn't demand a window office, but I don't work on a cardboard box, either. As for the Internet - I have seen some absolutely ridiculous lock-downs by admins in the past. At one location I ended up having to use a Verizon cell phone tethered on a laptop just to get email. Again, not knowing the specifics, I won't be part of the mob.

    I worked at one location where the (only) server was on top of a cardboard box so that it could hold up the counter where the coffee maker was because the counter's support had broken out. They had 100+ external employees pulling their assignments off of it through a 384 kBps DSL, and no one there saw any problem with it. The external employees most certainly did, however. I got stuck on a broken particle board desk in the corner of the conference room.

    Lo and behold, first week on the job: The coffee pot is dropped. The server dies (smoke and everything), and all seems lost. I watched the IT guy (who gave me my lovely accommodations) completely flip out and storm off while I sat quietly. After he salvaged the tape drive from the server and put it in his machine, he found his backups hadn't run in months.

    I said nothing. After all, I was there to develop, not administer servers. No one thought to ask me, either.

    After an hour or so, he was told to go home. The owner came to me and asked what could be done. I had just two hours prior finished mirroring their "environment" (for lack of a better term) to a VM on my dev machine to start testing.

    I told him I would need the (former) IT director's office "for the hardware" as it had just become obvious the break room was not working well as a server facility. Two firewall changes and a fixed IP address on the VM later, and they were rolling again. Built them a new server the next day, and put it in the office. Installed, configured, and TESTED a tape backup solution, and all was well.

    For what it's worth, that IT director was doing the "ZIP file with the date as the filename" VCS, too.

    It's all in the point-of-view, I suppose.

    BLUE! If only because this happens all too often and everyone needs to know this.

  • MinorHavoc (unregistered) in reply to wingcommander
    wingcommander :
    In a hardware store- once saw Duck brand Duct tape. Had a duck on the label and everything.
    Fun fact: back when the company launched Duck Brand Duct Tape, they specifically said it was because so many people called duct tape "duck tape". They decided it would make an easily recognizable and familiar brand name.
  • (cs) in reply to dkf

    [quote user="Kensey"]The name scheme I've come to prefer for business use goes something like [division][office location][function][ID], e.g. FIN-NYC-FS-01 (finance division, NYC office, file server 01). When a user calls and tells me their network share on FIN-NYC-FS-01 is not responding, I know right away which field tech to have go kick it.[/quote]So if some piece of kit gets reassigned (or worse still, not reassigned but just moved between offices) you've got to rename it and update everything that depends on the old name? Are you nuts?! You're mixing up identity with both attributes and roles. Far far simpler to just use a name that doesn't change when you update the place you've put it or what some people are using it for. And if you think that looking stuff up in an asset management DB is too hard, well, … words fail me.[/quote]

    In the environments we used that name scheme in, the data storage was all SAN-based -- many of the servers booted from it. So if a server moved from one office or function to another, quite likely the data would not.

    A couple of times we worked around hardware failure by taking the server's SAN boot LUN, cloning it, and just booting a different server off it.

    In that scenario, the servers were very much interchangeable parts.

    Addendum (2010-05-30 18:59): Snipped the attribution to dkf by mistake... ah well.

  • Koolio (unregistered) in reply to littlebobbytables

    Scary. We use source safe here. Tried to sell SVN to management a while back...but...yeah...

  • George (unregistered) in reply to PITA

    Until some tech swaps the machine for a repair and forgets to rename the replacement. Then once the first machine is fixed and gets installed somewhere down the hall. Or two floors down. Or down the street.. etc....

  • AnthonyC (unregistered)

    Of course, the real Mr. Van Halen actually did have a good reason for the whole m&m thing. It was page amidst page after page of actually-important technical requirements: elctrical systems, ability of the stage to bear certain loads, and so one. Checking for the wrong color m&m was a quick way to ensure they had actually read- and complied with- the tech specs as well. Which, in many cases, they hadn't.

  • (cs) in reply to Buddy
    Buddy:
    Bumble Bee Tuna:
    "Resources were cobbled together, servers configured, security enabled, duct tape applied, and while still a bit rough, all in all, to Justin and Brian's satisfaction, they had gotten in place what they felt was a robust solution for cheap."

    Ah, the mighty 7 comma sentence.

    11 word sentence, each two letters:

    If it is to be, it is up to me.

    And you squeezed that whole eleven word sentence into just ten words. I'm impressed!

  • Spudd86 (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous

    Actually pretty much the only thing Duct tape isn't very good at is sealing ductwork (some people CALL it Duck tape, but it's the same stuff)

  • Anonymous (unregistered) in reply to Anonymous
    Duct tape: heat resistant tape specifically designed for ducting and other high-heat applications.

    Duck tape: magic universal waterproof anything fixer.

    Get it right guys, you don't want end up with duct tape when you really need some duck tape.

    http://www.octanecreative.com/ducttape/duckvsduct.html

    well golly gee....

  • WombRaider (unregistered)

    This reminded me of a source control WTF that I ran into recently. After spending months installing TFS, getting the whole team up and running on it, and to the point where everything was happy, a new manager took over and announced that the entire department would be switching back to SourceSafe 6.0d. As of this point, the department had been using TFS for almost 2 years without incident, but evidently this guy doesn't understand it, or like it, or something. So in the year 2010, they're reinstalling SourcceSafe 6.0d and downgrading to it. Awesome.

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