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Tell HN: Wells Fargo completely offline

news.ycombinator.com

211–220 of 256 posts

Re: Tell HN: Wells Fargo completely offline

#211

For everyone complaining about "how could they not have failover" let me ask you this: Would you take a job with Wells Fargo to fix their infrastructure? And if you did take such a job, how long do you think it would take you to get the budget and approvals from all the auditors necessary to fix everything? How much would they have to pay you to take that job, knowing how frustrating it would be to get anything done?…

Nice mentor you got there

Heh, well he's also a brilliant technologist. He just has other priorities now.

Re: Tell HN: Wells Fargo completely offline

#213
post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They had redundancy, the redundancy failed. I mean truthfully when do you get to test your redundancy against a true disaster. It was a mess. WF is 20 companies rolled into one so the fact the disparate systems from 10 different banks works at all is kind of a miracle.

There is this company that had a grid power issue, batteries kicked in batteries running low, diesel generator show time, diesel generator doesn’t kick in. people scramble to shutdown before the batteries run out. So ITIL stuff happens and time to test it, guess what? diesel again doesn’t kick in (don’t recall the consequences thou)

Please expand ITIL, I don't know what it means.

Re: Tell HN: Wells Fargo completely offline

#214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there something to prevent the rate from skyrocketing when you renew the mortgage? Doesn't this have all the issues people occasionally have with ARMs?

Nope. Rates are based off a prime lending rate which is equal amongst all the big banks. But like they said, you are free to shop around. Credit unions usually have good offers. Ideally you’re not buying a home that you can’t afford if rates go up too much.

That assumes there is some sane upper bound on rates, but they can fluctuate quite a lot depending on how the economy is doing (7% doesn't seem like too much of a stretch). I agree that you should not buy a house near your carrying capacity, but I also posit that if you start out 7% lower that it will hurt your standard of living more than you expect.

Re: Tell HN: Wells Fargo completely offline

#215
post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a different level of criticality for "my post didn't go through, hit refresh" and "my transaction didn't go through - the restaurant said my card isn't working." Would you honestly want to go to a bank and say "if we unplug this, we can find out what fails."

Facebook handles money too, though. Also I think the parent was making the point that Facebook builds software with resiliency in mind so when a failure does happen, the software deals with it gracefully.

They can have (and did have, at least the long time ago when I still used it) weird cache persistency errors and "please just refresh to fix that" type of workflows if you have bad luck. That sort of behaviour is simply not acceptable for a bank.

Re: Tell HN: Wells Fargo completely offline

#216
post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The next worst thing for electronics after fire - water! Or are there non liquid fire suppression systems such as pulling all the oxygen out of a room (if there aren't any people in it)?

Ahh... The VAX war. http://bogpeople.com/funny/content/vaxwarstory.html > VAXen, my children, just don't belong some places. Suffice to say... yes. There are fire suppression systems that will pull oxygen out of the room. People are advised to leave the room before the fire suppression system takes effect.

People are also advised to leave the room before the fire takes effect.

Re: Tell HN: Wells Fargo completely offline

#217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your deposits, sure, your trust, of course. The mortgage loan? Fat chance.

Unless evil corp was using a blockchain to have an immutable ledger, there's a chance (although extremely small)

If evil corp stores said buzzword stack exclusively on that large rack that's currently on fire because of compliance nothing is gained. Not every problem is a nail.

Re: Tell HN: Wells Fargo completely offline

#218
post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The resultant 12% oxygen is 60% of normal atmospheric air. It's still breathable, if you're an average healthy person with healthy cardiac and pulmonary function, sitting at rest - but it's not healthy, it's enough that you're going to start seeing systemic responses. The reduction in partial pressure of oxygen being sucked into the lungs will also cause an increase in the partial pressure of carbon dioxide and inert…

Possibly more importantly, the "venting" is not what you'd call a gentle breeze. "Explosive atmosphere replacement" is a better description. Solid things will go airborne at speed.

Huh, so I was curious and looked up demonstration videos. Some of them looked similar to an indoor hurricane and some of them looked like a gentle breeze. The classroom-style (small room with a few Inergen bottles) demonstrations had the biggest effect and the actual datacenter tests just looked like a small breeze. Maybe in an actual datacenter the Inergen:open space ratio is substantially smaller than demonstrations in a small room?

Re: Tell HN: Wells Fargo completely offline

#219

For everyone complaining about "how could they not have failover" let me ask you this: Would you take a job with Wells Fargo to fix their infrastructure? And if you did take such a job, how long do you think it would take you to get the budget and approvals from all the auditors necessary to fix everything? How much would they have to pay you to take that job, knowing how frustrating it would be to get anything done?…

It's not like people blame the staff working on wiring the network hardware here. For any company in that position I'd assume they realize their dependence on that part of the infrastructure for their core business. I don't really see the relevance of how long compliance processes take, that's part of the industry and WF didn't discover the internet last week. Salaries in finance reflect that frustration, who cares.

If the answer to that challenge was one of "too hard", "it works for now" or "too expensive" that's still a strategic failure that impacts their core business now.

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