Posted on 06/16/2011 11:45:11 AM PDT by ShadowAce
"Every software engineer should have the heart of a code writer.
In a jar on his desk."
I have seen a lot of companies including global banks that claim that they need 5 9’s and RTO and RPO of zero. That is till they see the price tag. Then things get trimmed back very quickly.
If you have a client that is truely that demanding, you have both a blessing and a curse. And you will likely see things at that account you will not see ever again. Besides, it makes a good resume builder.
Oracle v. SAP. $1.4B please. Thank you very much.
Back in the day, no, the day before that, the difference between taking a full Friday night backup or conducting a full system restore, was a sleepy operator typing either a “1” or a “2” at 04:00 Saturday morning. You guessed it. That operator mounted tape after tape, blindly following the system prompts until better than half of the production data on our System 370 had been overwritten with the previous week’s data. The boss, myself and a couple of my cohorts spent the next 55 hours in the DC straightening out that mess.
Again...a blessing and a curse.
I have nothing to do with that account. But I know people that do.
I don't have to fix their stuff but then again, I don't get to take credit as the Miracle Worker.
it does, but at the same time, you have to remember that they once lost a probe to Mars because they had two different groups working on it, one that used imperial measurements, the other used metrics.
Years ago, I was working in a datacenter that had about 13, HP-3000s with about 120 or so big washtub disk drives strung out the back on the floor. We also had a water-cooled IBM 3090, and a couple of miscellaneous Dec 11/780s. With all these systems up and running, this was a loud room to work in.
One day we had some fine fellows hanging wallpaper in the corridor that connected the computer room from the secure area you had to go through to enter.
There was a Big Red Button on the wall that had the words "EMERGENCY POWER CUT OFF" printed over in it large red letters. This button also had a cover over it that had to be pulled up in order to press the button, so noone could bump it by accident.
You remember those fine fellows hanging wallpaper? Well, they had to take that cover off the BRB so they could hang their wallpaper.
It was about 4:30 or so and we were right in the middle of shift change. A bunch of us were standing around talking and passing on info about what had happened the previous shift and what was coming up. Suddenly, we heard a huge BANG and it went dark as we heard the slow wind-down of all the fans, drives, and computers.
It became really quiet in that room. A kind of quiet you seldom hear, as our ears were so accustomed to the drone of the fans and drives, the lack thereof was even more profound than it might otherwise had been. We all kind of looked at each other and then looked out to the corridor, and saw where one of the fine fellows hanging wallpaper had accidently brushed up against that Big Red Button.
The aftermath was kind of interesting. We went through, hit the individual power switches on all the disk drives and other peripherals, to turn them off, then brought power back on.
Once we were sure power was stable, we started turning on the drives to the HP-3000 boxes. Out of the 12 systems, (that had thousands of users), 9 of them just kinda sat there and waited until each of its drives were fully up and connected, then they started executing the next instruction in their stack. I didn't know it at the time, but apparently they contained their own battery backup in the chassis, and just waited until they could continue right on with their work! To the thousands of users connected to these systems, their terminals just froze for a while, then continued right where they had left off. Total downtime for most of these systems was 15-30 minutes. (This represented thousands of hours of cumulative user downtime.)
The 3090 didn't fare so well. Apparently, they don't particularly like it when someone just yanks power from underneath them. Took about 13 or so hours to get it fully operational again.
I'll never forget what the Sound of Silence is really like.
My source (the prof) was one of the people who worked on the system, so while it might be a tall tale, it doesn't qualify as urban legend. It was being passed on as a "this is what I saw" not "this is what some other guy saw".
Basically, the point was that the guys in charge of calculating weight (for fuel, etc.) literally had no concept of a system component that had no weight. So they're acting like "I don't care how insignificant you think it is, I've got to know exactly!" -- thinking that the software developers were just being stubborn.
Wow. Just wow.
I worked in a company once where they hired a Russian engineer, and he designs this frame weldment, dimensions it all in cm, with no notes to that effect, then is stunned when it comes back built to his dimensions — in inches! He couldn’t even figure out what the problem was at first. Not the sharpest tool in the shed. He had this big story of how he quasi-escaped from the USSR, but after I worked with him for a while, I decided his presence was (whether knowingly or not on his part) a plan by the Sovs to destroy US manufacturing.
But how could any space-program ME be so inane? How was he smart enough to find the shop every morning if he couldn’t reason any better than that? Would you trust a guy like that to engineer a spacecraft?
I dunno. My guess it was some low-level flunkie who was given a list of system components and told to go find out what the weight of each one was.
Probably right.
After he left the boss turned to us, who were choking back tears, and said, "That won't work on me."
People get tunnel vision. When they’re working in one section of the project that requires one type of thinking even the smart ones can have a hard time adjusting to dealing with a different section where that type of thinking just doesn’t apply. I’ve lost track of how many GOOD project managers I’ve fielded the “how many tests does QA get done in a day” question from, they are quantitative people used to dealing with definable work units and “things just get done” world of QA makes no sense to them. That’s why test cases were invented, they’re a convenient fiction no QA department actually pays attention to but that gives project managers a handle for their gantt charts.
I was installing a medium-sized cluster for a client. The VP of my company had decided to tag along to see what we did in the field. I didn't mind, as I was pretty good at my job, and I had been to this client several times previously. We all got along.
So we arrive on site and start assembling this thing (I typically started from boxes, and ended up with a usable machine), and it took a few days. In the meantime, I had noticed that the power being supplied to me was insufficient, and pointed it out to the client. He got facilities there, and they changed out the power connectors for me while I continued working on the system.
I plugged everything in, and turned on the system.
10 minutes later the power to four buildings (including the one I was in) went down hard. Turns out that the power panel we were connected to was already slightly overloaded before we got there. Adding this power drain was just too much.
Wasted a day and a half to get things right again. :)
...And the VP finally got to understand why I claimed that something always goes wrong at these installs--and never the same thing twice.
It really does happen. At the MN Supercomputer Center we spent months trying to figure why the Crays were crashing inexplicably. As the lead software tech I was huddled at the console at 3am with a bunch of CRI engineers while the janitor was in the opposite end of the room with a power sweeper. We noticed that he brushed a rack on the far end of the room at exactly the moment that the Cray crashed. We had him do it again. The Cray crashed again.
What happened is that the racks were bolted to the metal grid of the raised floor panels. An electrical spark ran from his sweeper through the floor grid and into the heaviest ground wire in room, which was connected to the Cray. So basically any spark or electrical glitch anywhere in the room was being funneled into the poor Cray.
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