Ask HN: Was the Y2K crisis real?

Story time: years ago (2010-ish?), we were doing some light web CMS work for a client. Nothing too complex, except we had to regenerate one section off a data feed that we received in a very peculiar custom format.

Great, everything worked, we finished on time and on budget. And then: "oh, and could you also check this other site? We need some minor tweaks on what your predecessors made". That other site was also consuming that data feed, so we took a peek. It ran in PHP3, walled off from everything, processed its own intermediate languageS, and the output was a massive 200+ page PDF (which was then manually shipped to offset print in large quantities). For Reasons, this had to run daily and had to work on first try. There was no documentation, no comments, and no development environment: apparently this was made directly on prod and carefully left untouched.

Needless to say, the code was massively interdependent, so that the minor tweaks were actually somewhat harder. We did manage to set up a development VM though, and document it a bit - but last I checked, the Monstrous Book Of Monsters Generator still seems to be chugging along in its containment.

I don't have much time right now, but I'll share a moment when I saw him interacting with some people during a crisis.

We got hit really hard with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_Red_(computer_worm) even though only a minority of our systems were running Windows at the time. There were, at the time, a pair of Windows servers in each store, and each store was connected via a 56k frame relay circuit to the home office, along with a modem connected to a standard phone line for dial backup in case that was down.

Anyway, Code Red rapidly spread through all of these servers, and together they created enough traffic to basically bring down the frame relay network. We were, at the time, slightly over-subscribed at the T1 termination points, so if most of the stores on a termination leg maxed out their individual 56k links at the same time, the whole leg would be effectively down.

(Apologies for the unexpected dive into old networking stuff...it kind of just came out. :)

So most of our stores were down hard, meaning that most card transactions would not work. There was a facility to allow credit cards to go through without verification with a relatively low charge ceiling. But especially back then most transactions were NOT credit, and so weren't working.

This was a bad, bad situation, and it persisted for a number of days. It might have garnered some national news attention.

There were a number of war rooms going on. My team was in one, and we were working towards a solution by using a transient dial backup connection to reach into the store router and apply a draconian ACL.

ANYway, back to Kevin Turner. We saw him talking to a group of VPs and directors outside of our war room. He dismissed most of them, except for one, with whom he continued to have a very heated conversation.

Turner was definitely the aggressor; he got closer and closer to this person, got louder and louder. He ended up backing him against a wall and shouting in his face for a few minutes before walking away, jabbing his finger in his chest.

Just one story. We didn't like KT very much.

Linux has had plenty of opportunity to fix stuff, all wasted.

Just a public service announcement that the decisions you make today for good reasons can, in retrospect, be seen as a huge mistake. The future view of your decisions will always have better knowledge than you have when you make that decision.