Every fifth or sixth BOFH, there's a timely one that I can simply forward to certain individuals because it saves me from actually issuing relevant threats or looking like a... ummm... BOFH. This one is one of the most timely and helpful in recent memory.
BOFH: The ONE-NINE uptime solution
"So what's the problem again?" the Boss asks, lurching into Mission Control like a Dalek with stepper motor problems. "We're not sure - it's not internet connectivity because we can get to other sites ok, but we're definitely having problems with the email site." "We shouldn't be!" he snaps back, presumably thinking that a …
COMMENTS
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Friday 27th February 2015 20:34 GMT chivo243
Re: Love it!
@Doctor Syntax
As I said, I was nearly convulsing with laughter at the first excellent joke. Maybe I should have taken another breath before reading, as the Schrodinger joke is a winner too. However, I have been watching Futurama lately, maybe Bender has been influencing me because all I want is blackjack and hookers! Not quite strippers, but can still suck some money like a hoover
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Friday 27th February 2015 20:32 GMT The_Idiot
Crashed? I remember crashed...
"No I mean crashed - as in into the footpath from the 6th floor"
Ah, me. Old war stories...
It was long ago, and far away, and in a country I no longer inhabit. But I had to go install a standard 'newer-faster' system for a client. Of course, 'newer-faster' also meant 'rather a lot smaller' as well. Which was lucky. The old system was on the second floor (UK) - so third floor for my US cousins - of the client's building. It was old, big iron. It was so big, when it was installed they'd had to take a wall out and crane it in. So it was a good job the new one was smaller. I had to fit it into a corner of the room. So I did, and all was well. The staff hated the old system and loved the new one. Great, right?
So two weeks later, I go back to do a site follow up. The company owner and managing director was waiting for me. He said I was to follow him to the machine room. He told me to shut down the new system. I could tell something was up - there was a double plastic sheet barrier at one end of the machine room and the end wall was missing (god knows how the new system survived the wall being taken out).
The site siren sounded, and all the staff started gathering behind a barrier on the ground.
Then the Board members came in. They took off their jackets, rolled up their sleeves - and started pushing the old system units on their old wheels. And they pushed and they pushed - through the double sheeting and all the way to the open wall. Then they pushed some more. While the staff down below cheered like mad (they _really_ hated the old system), the chairman turned to me and he said 'Well then. That's bloody decommissioned the bugger, right?'
Staff morale was never higher, and I'm sure that was why he did it. But lordy - that was a great day :-)))))))).
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Friday 27th February 2015 21:33 GMT Herby
On "decommissioning"
Sometimes you need to be careful. There might be valuable data on them. Usually a proper BOFH scans for the emails to/from the boss's mistress for good value.
Of course when you attempt a recovery at a later date, you are always guessing "what was the password I used 5 years ago".
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Tuesday 3rd March 2015 08:39 GMT Anonymous Coward
Re: this was needed a year ago
It's amazing how much an organisation can spend on a "free" external mail solution.
Like.... 3 years and £5million to implement it (badly).
It doesn't work properly, But it's "free"
Nevermind how much kit that money could have bought if it wasn't for a deal sealed by a handshake on a golf course.
Anon because I still work there - and I'm still surprised the Public Accounts Committee hasn't weighed in on this particular cock-up.
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Friday 27th February 2015 23:22 GMT Anonymous Coward
Closer to the truth than many will realise
We had a similar problem but with less drama (and much less quicklime) a few years ago.
Our mail server, a sparc 10 box, needed replacing. It still worked, but the 10-year life soldered-on lithium battery to hold the boot configuration had gone about 5 year previous so any attempt at booting the thing needed prayer to the God of 6GB SCSI disks to spin up and cryptic typing at the boot loader prompt (on compulsory yellow sticky note) to have much chance of it going.
Nobody wanted to setup and manage a mail server and our organisation who had another "official" mail server (several years younger than ours) had dithered for a year or so about what to do. So, for our sins, we went with Google and it works mostly, but sucks donkey balls in various ways.
This decision gave us a lot of flak from above, but nothing actually happened as they were still paralysed about what to do themselves. Then about a year later they went with MS' hosted email, which sucks donkey balls in ways of a subtly different flavour.
We all "saved" money, we all have something that is basically outside of our control and issues of privacy have been conveniently overlooked. MS' promise of European hosting was good enough, apparently. They still fall over and basically tell us to piss off if we have a problem (Gmail can't be configured to allow certain types of attachment, MS' IMAP support is shit, etc). Progress, eh?
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Sunday 1st March 2015 16:17 GMT Trygve Henriksen
Re: One Nine would be 90%, surely.
The 'nines' is a reference to how many '9' are in the uptime statistics.
One nine = 9%
Two Nine = 99%
Three nine = 99.9%
Does 'three nine' sound good enough?
Actually, it's slightly over 8Hours, 45Minutes downtime/Year for a 24/7 system.
A 'four niner' means slightly less than 53minutes downtime/year.
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Tuesday 3rd March 2015 08:56 GMT Trygve Henriksen
Re: One Nine would be 90%, surely.
90% uptime is a 'one niner'... Yeah, right...
For practical use, neither 9% nor 90% is tolerable, so the scale really should start at 'Two niner'(99%)
(90% uptime means the system can be offline for over a MONTH each year... 9% means about one month uptime/year. )
Two niner is about what I'd expect for personal websites and low-traffic, special-interest forums on the net.
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Friday 6th March 2015 22:39 GMT Keeees
Rubbish
Five nines as long as nothing goes wrong, yeah any old x86 box will do that most of the time. But agreeing (with consequences) that it WILL be up 99.999% for the coming year is a completely different story.
Five nines is a bit over 5 minutes of downtime per year.
I dunno about you, but it takes me longer than that to even get out of bed and fire up a computer if said legacy box craps out at 4 AM. Promising five nines takes having kit working together across multiple datacenters, to start with.
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Monday 2nd March 2015 10:51 GMT Anonymous Custard
...they'll be throwing money at it like it's a stripper with a vacuum cleaner
...they'll be throwing money at it like it's a stripper with a vacuum cleaner.
Whatever floats your boat Simon, whatever floats your boat :)
Missed this one for beer o'clock, but gave a nice gentle start to avoiding work this Monday morning...