h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

{I know it doesn't happen unless disaster has struck once, and then only maybe....}

How true!

A proper disaster would have ensured they get it right next time, but I might have been out of a job as a result. I'm hoping they got a good proper scare out of it. I certainly did.

It's always that... being safe is expensive, so people choose the cheap way out. Completely losing the system would be so much more expensive, but "it won't happen to us". Until it does.

Write up a brief incident report explaining what happened, what was done and also what could have happened and your best recommendations for preventing an apocalyptic cluster in the future.

First of all, I would take a week off to repair the nerve damage!

Writing a report sounds like a good idea, but I don't think you should do it on your own. Bosses don't like to have it shoved in their face that they've been screwing up royally for the past two years and may just be tempted to put the blame on the messenger. I would try and secure as many signatures from your department as possible on that incident report.

The report is for the customer, not the boss. However, having the boss sign off on it, is a good idea.

Back in the olden days, when we wrote code on stone tablets, I wrote a catalogue program for a television repair shop.

In the few years between the introduction of the PC and windows 95 (and Visual Basic) I found a fairly useful place by writing programs that actually made computers helpful for small local companies. I was primarily using BASIC, and compiling it after the customer was satisfied.



The entire centre of the work room was a huge rectangle of filing cabinets, each drawer filled with technical manuals for each component of the set. Each set could have up to 4 or 5 manuals that might need to be read to solve various problems.

They wanted to enter any of several hundred TV models and instantly locate all of the relevant manuals. I finally wrote a data file for each of the types of manuals and cross indexes for the models and files by cabinet, drawer and individual file number.

All went well for about a year, then I got a call from the customer. He had decided to remove several hundred old manuals at the same time. "I hit the update button and it has been running non-stop for 3 days," he complained.

I agreed to go to the shop and see what was happening. Fortunately I had not yet compiled the program so I could pause and single step through long enough to read the flags and see how far along it was.

Each of the manuals had to run a bubble sort in every data file for each file deleted. I told him all was running well and it should be done by the next afternoon. He thanked me and told me how much the program had helped them. I only suggested they update the data for a dozen manuals at a time in the future.

Just thought you might enjoy this

FS

I enjoyed it - and I almost understood it. I think...

I shudder to think how much computer time was wasted on bubble sorts when there were infinitely quicker sort algorithms. They just weren't taught.

At one time, we had a server restarted that had been up and running for 10 years solid - yes, we all held our breaths, and I don't even w*rk in the IT section! Thankfully, the server survived.

And to think that I recently (yesterday, in fact) threw a fit when our financial system dived, because the first response after sending a top priority e-mail to our IT support was a phone call 15 minutes later asking why one of our hotel employees couldn't access it. Because NOBODY could access it, did no one read my e-mail?

In my defense, I will say that it was in the middle of closing the books for February. And we've had this kind of problem repeatedly ever since outsourcing our Internet communications (or whatever it's called).

I kept a close eye on the system outside of our Citrix environment (which seems to be involved in the communication problem) and noticed users getting back online (after I had forcibly thrown everyone out one by one).

When I learnt that our IT dept had called the supplier (who is also hosting the system) asking them to restart the server, I went bonkers, knowing just how many export and import jobs we had ticking at that time.

Checking with nearby colleagues that they could indeed log in again, I called the emergency number and had the supplier cancel the restart.



I don't know how to get *all the staff at our IT dept to understand that no, there's nothing wrong with the system, it's the communication! I know that all case solutions are logged, but some persons never bother to check.

10 years? Wow. It must have felt to the server like it had come out of prison and been told it had missed the mini-skirt era.

It did run a lot smoother afterwards

http://feed.dilbert.com/~r/dilbert/daily_strip/~3/0zC8PJJzx-Q/

Did you ever read about how the Dictionary of Symbols was originally put together? They didn't have these nifty computers, you see, they had cards. With holes in.

And knitting needles...clever Scandinavians.

what dictionary?

Yeah, fellow Scandivanians would r-e-a-l-l-y like to know which dictionary Dimitri was referring to?

http://taxonomist.tripod.com/indexing/liungman.html

The Dictionary of Symbols by Carl Liungman.