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On Sun, Aug 30, 2015 at 11:54 AM, Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@×××××.com> wrote: |
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> Technically, we should do a power down test every 6 months or so, but |
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> that turns out not to be a yes/no test in real life; it's a yes/destroy |
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> test and no-one wants to make a decision either way. So we all sit in |
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> limbo and wait for some exterior event to decide for us (like black-outs) |
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> |
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Half the time these are ancient services that have long been replaced |
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but nobody can bring themselves to make the call to get rid of the old |
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servers. Maybe there were 10M records in the database and 9.998M of |
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them were migrated to a new database, but due to some issue the rest |
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couldn't be, so the old server stays up just in case anybody ever |
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needs the old data, and so on. |
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Typically these would just stick around until finally some hardware |
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component fails, and then it gets written off. |
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Sadly, this course of forcing hands seems to be going away. At work |
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somebody tried to hand me an ancient system to look after in my spare |
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time. Apparently they just finished virtualizing it. Go figure - |
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they have VAX VMs available for Linux these days. The problem is that |
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KT and maintaining documentation and not being the person who gets the |
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finger pointed at when something goes wrong costs the company time and |
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money, and in this case for almost zero value. |
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Usually the problems with technology aren't technical in nature... |
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-- |
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Rich |
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