What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on? • Hacker News Board

Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

#91

Post by gumby » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 4:55 PM UTC

LgWoodenBadger wrote: post #6

When I was at Siemens, who had an astounding multi-national PKI on smart cards that integrated with everything, we had to use some software from Hitachi to change our passwords. It rarely worked IME. Hitachi is a name that I think of for power tools and heavy equipment, but not for software.

Hitachi-san is a huge conglomerate.

SEGA built a lot of hardware around Hitachi's SH CPUs. First time I visited SEGA I was surprised to see that they also had...Hitachi elevators in the building. I noted that I was giving my talk using a Hitachi OHP and Hitachi whiteboards and furniture. I looked up to see how much time I had and observed I was using Hitachi time.

As it happens SEGA was never our customer though we did so much work for them; Hitachi paid our bills.

Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

#92

Post by IceWreck » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 4:57 PM UTC

philovivero wrote: post #56

Oracle. I'm not joking. I've seen actual companies use this stuff as a database server.

Seriously it takes Oracle thirty minutes to create a new database. Stuff that Postgres or MariaDB can do in seconds.

Also, why does the database have 5 GB of dependencies ? Postgres and MariaDB both have < 100 MB (maybe 10 MB) downloads from the repos.

Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

#93

Post by ethbr0 » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:06 PM UTC

analog31 wrote: post #83

GartzenDeHaes wrote: post #38

In the server room of a state government agency, sitting on top of a server rack was an old, yellowing AST 128 desktop PC (pentium 128). It sat there with it's little green light glowing and no one paid much attention to it. One day, a newer employee unplugged it and put in the excess equipment pile. Later that day, people were trying to track down a state-wide outage of the business license issuance process. They tr…

The entire World Wide Web was protected by a similar sticky note, for a time: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:First_Web_Server.jpg

To be fair, if the entire World Wide Web had gone offline then, it would have probably affected Tim Berners-Lee, Robert Cailliau, and maybe one person who was reading http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html

Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

#94

Post by hazeii » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:08 PM UTC

Pretty much my first on-site service job: the company I was working for made motion-control systems for animation, controlled by a PDP-11. The customer was an animation studio, so dead in the water without the system working. Problem was it wasn't booting, so I had to go on site, open the side of the cabinet and reposition the goose-neck lamp used as the light source for the paper-tape reader. Problem solved, happy customer.

Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

#95

Post by hpen » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:17 PM UTC

GartzenDeHaes wrote: post #38

In the server room of a state government agency, sitting on top of a server rack was an old, yellowing AST 128 desktop PC (pentium 128). It sat there with it's little green light glowing and no one paid much attention to it. One day, a newer employee unplugged it and put in the excess equipment pile. Later that day, people were trying to track down a state-wide outage of the business license issuance process. They tr…

Any idea why they would use this architecture?

Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

#96

Post by retrac » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:17 PM UTC

stonemetal12 wrote: post #57

A small industrial automation shop, 40 total, 5 software people. The "IT department" was some kid who hadn't worked IT before. Spent most of his time learning how to manage exchange by messing around with our live locally hosted exchange server. Their controls were written in C. The development process was you checked a computer out of the warehouse, installed Windows, then some janky realtime OS addon, visual studio…

> The backups where a couple of cheap portable hard drives.

Which places them light-years ahead of many operations.

Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

#97

Post by dghughes » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:22 PM UTC

Not sure if this counts but I worked at a small casino and the servers managing the floor could barely function. The payment system was a mess too not just due to technical issues but also from "territorial" issues.

The servers were IBM eServers servers old and out of date when they were purchased the warranty was extended multiple times. A Debain cluster for slot machine control, and a database server was also the domain controller using Win 2000 cluster.

The clusters always failed and auto-failover failed. So me not officially IT would have to manually failover the cluster or the casino couldn't operate. There was also another Java app called process initialization which also failed and I had to restart that too manually.

I was also the only person the building/province/400km region who knew the admin passwords for the systems I still recall them.

Add to that the debit machines would lose connection and the debit machines at lunchtime for a 200 person buffet were offline. Often a reboot of the DSL mocdem or most often it was a trip to the third floor ventilation room/cross connect. The five port switch had six cables and people would pull one and put in their cable for their system. That's territorial part my department is more important than yours so cabled yanked out no warning.

As a system it was terrible and a multi million dollar business relied on it and relied on me as a non-IT person to maintain it. It wasn't anywhere near my job description and I got nothing extra for it but management demanded I fix it. They ended up laying me off suddenly one day tow hours into my shift after 13 years no explanation.

Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

#98

Post by wazoox » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:23 PM UTC

One of my customer is a world famous cultural institution. Around 2007 IIRC, they asked me if I could devise a way to backup their payroll system, because I was their go-to Unix/Linux expert and "it runs on some Unix thing".

So I went with the CIO to the HR office to check the "thing". The setup was as follows: between the two office windows, there was a small table with on it, a Sun SS20 workstation of 1993 vintage, connected to a bunch of 1 or 2 GB SCSI drives, all covered with a 5 cm, hairy blanket of dust. A tangled nest of serial cables (yep, the RS232 style) were going from a serial expansion MBUS card to all of the HR people's PCs in the room (through USB adapters). They were connecting to the thing using good old HyperTerminal...

The machine also had a modem that was used, eons ago, when it was under some form of support from the supplier of the solution, to monitor the setup. Of course nobody had done any update nor any system maintenance since 1998, so it was still running Solaris 2.x.

Of course I didn't have the root password. The thing was running a database (Informix or Oracle, not sure) that I planned to backup to a Linux server through NFS (keep it simple). So I basically had to write a shell script using a syntax compatible with this antique kit to run through cron... Fortunately they had a spare SS20 that I used for this purpose!

The pay of several hundred people (maybe a thousand) was relying upon this system... several million € of pay checks every month!

Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

#99

Post by spookthesunset » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:24 PM UTC

dghughes wrote: post #97

Not sure if this counts but I worked at a small casino and the servers managing the floor could barely function. The payment system was a mess too not just due to technical issues but also from "territorial" issues. The servers were IBM eServers servers old and out of date when they were purchased the warranty was extended multiple times. A Debain cluster for slot machine control, and a database server was also the d…

You did that job for 13 years? Looking back, what would you have done different?

Re: What’s the jankiest piece of tech you’ve seen a company depend on?

#100

Post by zh3 » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 5:25 PM UTC

CapitalistCartr wrote: post #7

Web sites running on Mainframe, OS390. If any line of code/HTML is longer than 80 chars, it only reads the first line then stops. Because punch cards only took 80 chars.

Fortran had a 72-column limit on punch cards (the last 8 columns were used to number the cards in the deck). Even when we got VT100's there was some caution about going past column 72 (ISTR some of the VDU's would have a marker at column 72, possibly the compiler gave a warning too).