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?

#151

Post by cricalix » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 9:50 PM UTC

Not quite “running a company”, but a memory of bodging things together…

When I was in college, I ended up working for college IT. Fun job. A requirement came from somewhere that we needed to allow students to edit web pages (personal home pages) using the Windows lab PCs, with Microsoft Frontpage. Students had a home drive on H and a web drive on W (I think, it’s over 2 decades ago). Thing is, those weren’t on NT or a box running SAMBA, they were on a Netware server.

I cobbled together the combination of a Linux “server” (read spare PC, probably Pentium 60/90 era) running Apache, with the Frontpage extensions for Apache. So far so good.

Then I got an account set up in NDS for access to the data volume, and made IPX/SPX work on the Linux box. Turns out the perms were a bit wrong, and I could write files to SYSVOL, but that was easily fixed.

A bit of config magic in Apache, and student web pages could be edited in Frontpage, saved to Netware, read from Linux, and all the Frontpage bits we cared about actually worked. Faculty teaching web page design/building were very happy.

Also the era of Netscape Enterprise Server with roaming profiles on a RS/6000 box, but that was easy.

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

#152

Post by cricalix » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 9:53 PM UTC

cricalix wrote: post #151

Not quite “running a company”, but a memory of bodging things together… When I was in college, I ended up working for college IT. Fun job. A requirement came from somewhere that we needed to allow students to edit web pages (personal home pages) using the Windows lab PCs, with Microsoft Frontpage. Students had a home drive on H and a web drive on W (I think, it’s over 2 decades ago). Thing is, those weren’t on NT or…

Same place where we built a Student Information Service using REXX and whatever monstrosity IBM provided that let web pages render green screen entry forms. So you write stuff in RPG, add some REXX for data manipulation, and it spat out web pages. Crazy, but functional.

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

#153

Post by mikewarot » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 10:13 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…

They tore down Chesterton's fence before they knew why it was there. oops!

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

#154

Post by vigormortis » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 10:25 PM UTC

Back in the early 2000's I was the networking lead for a start-up managed services company. We made heavy use of Extreme Networks switches at the time. Though our experience with the hardware was largely positive, we did have a batch of rack switches that were consistently flakey, so we took them out of service and stacked them in a closet awaiting RMA. As we had the the unfortunate timing of starting business shortly before the dot.com implosion, the company didn't stay afloat for long and I jumped ship.

Fast forward 18 months and I found myself working as a systems engineer for a Pharmacy Benefits provider. I was not part of the networking team, but the networking lead approached me to help troubleshoot some pernicious network stability issues for their POS systems. They were also an Extreme Networks shop, so they they figured I might have some insight. The networking lead tried to set me up with access to the switches and was confused when I appeared to already have an account provisioned. Once I connected and began looking at the switch logs, I had simultaneous deja vu and "are you kidding me???" reactions. These were the very same switches I had personally configured and later scrapped during my previous gig. Apparently my new employer had bought the switches during a fire sale and put them into production with little to no configuration and they were just insanely lucky that their ip ranges and vlans overlapped what I had previously used.

I didn't stay very long at this company. Thankfully the haunted switches didn't follow me to my next job.

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

#155

Post by mikewarot » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 10:27 PM UTC

My boss at the gear company had software he used on his computer to do setups for Bevel Gears, that his dad had written in about 1984. He kept an old 32 bit computer around because it could still run TK-Solver! version 1.0 and thus those scripts (actually, a set of equations)

I virtualized it all in DOSbox, and set the printer output to spool to a real file, which then got printed if it wasn't blank, once the DOSBOX exited.

Fairly janky, but future proof for the most part.

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

#156

Post by james_s_tayler » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 11:11 PM UTC

IceWreck wrote: post #92

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.

I like how the arguments used to import the database need to match the arguments used to export the database. I can recall on two separate occasions receiving a database dump from a client site that took us two weeks to figure out how to successfully import. The second time we wound up writing a series of bash scripts that used the strings command on the database dump file in order to grep/sed/awk enough information to reconstruct the arguments needed to successfully import the database. We wound up taking it that far because the other two offices that worked on the product we did had DBAs and ours didn't, so their process when they needed to replicate bugs customers were reporting was to pester the DBA to import a DB for them which would take several days, and our process was to import it instantly via our magic script. Fun times.

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

#157

Post by dghughes » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 11:41 PM UTC

spookthesunset wrote: post #99

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?

In a way I did the job for 32 years but 13 of it with that company. I started out at age 14 fixing grey area poker machines, pinball, and arcade games. My first day I drove a manual transmission truck at age 14 to a bootlegger's to empty an illegal slot machine and I was handed a beer. I was self-taught in computers but mostly Windows and Linux but never took the leap in the mid 1990s in my 20s.

It was a no-win situation if I refused to not do what was really not my job I'm sure they would have found a way to fire me. I was being paid an OK wage it was double minimum wage. I did enjoy the technical work I saw it as experience in IT not just playing with simulators, or reading books but actual running systems.

It's hard to say what should have done differently but certainly I should have taken night classes or part time classes in IT. After being laid off I ended up doing that at a technical college which was only 500 yards away. I got $13K severance, and government paid for one year of my classes and unemployment. I pretty much had a two-year vacation to study computers. After I was gone I heard the place emptied of many long-term staff I'd like to think I was the spark that did that.

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

#158

Post by FireBeyond » Thu, Dec 16, 2021, 11:53 PM UTC

slavboj wrote: post #51

A large insurance company as of X years ago implemented iteratively reweighted least squares in pure SQL running against the claim database to fit their risk models. Honestly their implementation was impressive, in a WTF way, but doing literally thousands of queries and then manual adjustments of coefficients meant it took days to fit models that would have taken seconds to download the relevant data and train a mode…

I worked for a health insurance claims benefit management software company whose flagship was written in a language called DB/C (random bonus, the two co-owners of the company felt that two spaces for a tab stop was too small, four too large, so had standardized on a three space tab).

DB/C (or Databus) is a COBOL-esque language (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_Language_for_Busin...).

Over time, TCP/IP, sockets support had been bolted on, with varying degrees of rigidity to spec (and a whole ton of unimplemented "we don't need THAT" stuff).

But the prize for eyebleeding was the co-owner who had a megalomaniac (he could be heard, and I quote word for word, saying things like "People are idiots, I don't know why they would write [software X] that way. I can do it in a weekend" (and he would do "it", too, in 60 hour long benders. But not well. And with a whole bunch of arbitrary bullshit that you'd expect), masochistic, NIH obsession.

He wrote a fully functional XSL parser and interpreter. In a COBOL-esque language.

And while functional, oh boy, you probably saw few things uglier in your life.

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

#159

Post by jamal-kumar » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 12:19 AM UTC

phonethrowaway wrote: post #12

jamal-kumar wrote: post #5

I've seen some 1980s shit running THIS YEAR. I'm working on porting a foxpro database from 1988 that's running an active business which I won't talk about much before it's done, and have actually encountered in Costa Rica an auto parts shop in one of the sketchiest parts of the capital city of this country with a green on black phosphor screen running what looked like dBase III for what they were doing on old IBM PCs…

Old isn't janky... hmm... to me janky means duct tape and bubble gum.

This basically only runs on A: old hardware + operating system (no go, need to do other workstation tasks at that company), or B: a windows 7 virtual machine with DOS compat set up, anything else isn't working, windows 7 validation servers were recently taken down leaving things in a precarious state of support. That's basically what I would call held together by duct tape at this point

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

#160

Post by GartzenDeHaes » Fri, Dec 17, 2021, 12:23 AM UTC

hpen wrote: post #95

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?

Have you ever tried to connect an IBM mainframe to an HP Non-Stop (Tandem) mainframe? Some developer figured out a way to do it without spending millions on new mainframe software. The key piece of the kludge was a windows interface to the IBM RPC service that both had a USB dongle and wouldn't run on anything newer than Windows 2000.

This was something she had done as a maintenance request and no one else really knew anything about it, until it failed 10 years later. The server people did ask everyone who should know about the PC, so it wasn't just a plug pull.