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

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

#171

Post by mdip »

dylan604 wrote: post #82
jcpham2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too have a need to keep old computers online and it's frustrating when the CMOS battery dies and all those super important motherboard settings that make it boot from a hard drive in the first place are lost, over and over on every reboot. Not everyone knows that old computers do not necessarily boot from the hard drive by default.

Why not just replace the CMOS battery so you only have to do it once every 4th blue moon vs everytime the thing reboots?

I'm not sure what that engineer's reason specifically was, but I'll chock it up to laziness.

The CMOS batteries, themselves, have a shelf life and for whatever reason, we probably had none of the specific size required on hand. Being that the device was on battery backup in a rack, it probably led to the engineer thinking "it'll never be rebooted, a label will do"

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

#172

Post by mdip »

diroussel wrote: post #147
BizarroLand wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can even replace most CMOS batteries on a running machine without causing any issues. The power from the system will keep the BIOS set, and it's a 1 minute job for many servers, slide out the rack, pop the top, thin phillips screwdriver to the CMOS battery to pop the old one out, pop the new one in and button her up. Heck, you can buy 2 CMOS batteries for a buck at the dollar tree. They'll last a year or more wit…

Assuming the battery is not soldered in.

This model (and every other that I've seen, though, admittedly it's been a while since I've looked at a typical rack mount server) had an easily removed battery.

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

#173

Post by PeterWhittaker »

dotancohen wrote: post #121
dylan604 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you haven't worked at a place that entirely runs from a giant Excel file created by Janice who worked there for 2 years back in the 90s, then you just haven't lived.

That spreadsheet where Janice records the Mercedes Benz, the colour TV, and a night on the town?

Good one, he said wistfully, realizing exactly how old he was.

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

#174

Post by mdip »

spurtrenolds wrote: post #150
mdip wrote: post #3

I'll weigh in outside of Twitter. Back when I worked for a large telecom, we decided to move a datacenter from a mid-west, barely staffed site out to one of our larger datacenters. This was a year-long several-hundred rack problem that culminated in a hellish weekend of running cables and powering things up. It was "all hands" in IT and didn't matter that I worked in a capacity that kept me far away from hardware mos…

> by modem (this was 2008, not 1998) I'm mildly amused you consider modems obsolete. Here in the OT world and where systems need to be air gaped [1], modems are absolutely used to provide separated, secured links and non-IP links. They are not going away any time soon. [1] Example, the dial-up time servers provided by the NPL for offline systems https://www.npl.co.uk/getattachment/products-and-services/Ti...

I should have clarified -- the modem was really obsolete for the purposes it was being used.

The carrier involved was one that everyone has heard of. All of our other carrier billing was handled using a variety of authenticated links/services to the carrier. And this particular carrier had other, better, ways of doing it, too. For whatever reason, we had never altered that process. It was permanently fixed a few months after we got that host working again.

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

#175

Post by jcpham2 »

dylan604 wrote: post #82
jcpham2 wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too have a need to keep old computers online and it's frustrating when the CMOS battery dies and all those super important motherboard settings that make it boot from a hard drive in the first place are lost, over and over on every reboot. Not everyone knows that old computers do not necessarily boot from the hard drive by default.

Why not just replace the CMOS battery so you only have to do it once every 4th blue moon vs everytime the thing reboots?

Not all batteries on 486's are replaceable and serviceable.

Yes, we've soldered airplane batteries to 486's to keep them running longer

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