back to article 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 …

  1. IglooDude
    Thumb Up

    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.

    1. nichomach

      As I'm putting together quotes for new mail servers...

      ...I sympathise. A lot.

  2. phuzz Silver badge
    Pint

    A new BOFH at 16:30 on a friday? I'm glad I'm not a user trying to get something fixed because every* IT department in the UK just clocked off.

    * well, all the ones with their priorities straight who aren't already in the pub.

    1. eJ2095

      mind

      At. Least. It wasn't 10.18 pm..

    2. Anonymous Blowhard

      * well, all the ones with their priorities straight who aren't already in the pub.

      If their priorities are straight then they *are* in the pub!

    3. Giraffe67

      "because every* IT department in the UK just clocked off"

      in the UK?????

      And AU, NZ (I expect), etc & all the other good countries too.

      :)

  3. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Ahh it's Friday

    You had me at Dalek with a bad stepper motor. BOFH back in good form.

  4. chivo243 Silver badge
    Coffee/keyboard

    Love it!

    "they'll be throwing money at it like it's a stripper with a vacuum cleaner" Laughing so hard, I couldn't focus to read. I will be adding this to my list of witty comments for the Monday Morning Meeting....

    1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

      Re: Love it!

      Good, but not as good as "Look, as I said to Schrodinger - what happens in the cat box stays in the cat box."

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Love it!

        Oh, yes it is. I've seen enough strippers, in my time, to know how much they hate to bend over and pick up money. It's almost as much as they hate sorting and facing it at the end of the night.

      2. chivo243 Silver badge

        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

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: Love it!

          I think this was a BOFH where you could seriously injure yourself reading it.

        2. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: Love it!

          @chivo243

          I wasn't aware of your reference. Having been in my time a forensic biologist your mention of strippers & vacuum cleaners brought to mind distant recollections of some gems of medico-legal literature.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    My boFH mug arrived at 9am

    Excellent way to start the day..

    Then this arrives at 5pm, excellent way to end the day!

    Yes, its going to be a good weekend....

  6. skeptical i
    Pirate

    Badges?

    re: "all the plastic in the badges (with a vendor name no-one can remember any more) have started to discolour"

    "Badges? We ain't got no badges. We don' need no badges. I don' have to show you any steenkin' badges!"

    1. Mark 85
      Pint

      Re: Badges?

      And here, I always thought it was "Badgers? We ain't got no badgers. We don' need no badgers. I don' have to show you any steenkin' badgers!"

      Oh well. It's beer o'clock and I learned something.

      1. Steve Davies 3 Silver badge
        Pint

        Re: Badges?

        They are obviously thinking of the 'Badger' that is very drinkable around this time of day on a Friday.

      2. Phil W

        Re: Badgers?

        I thought it was badgers. Badgers, mushrooms and a snake.

      3. yorgasor

        Re: Badges?

        The original movie was "badges," but UHF used "badgers."

        https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gx6TBrfCW54

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    undeliverables anonymous

    That had me spill my pre-pub-coffee! Hilarious!

  8. fearnothing

    Where did that $ on the second 15K come from? Anyway, good one :) commendations on making my friday shift a bit more palatable.

  9. Florida1920
    Pint

    Best BOFH in ages

    No I mean crashed - as in into the footpath from the 6th floor

  10. thenim

    What is it with these ridiculously oversized ads...

    now blocking the text too... I would have enjoyed it but for the stupid ad blocking the text on the first page... useless...

    (yes I know ad block and all that shite, but still...)

  11. 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 :-)))))))).

  12. ma1010
    Coffee/keyboard

    Excellent!

    "I've got 5 quid on it being a coal-powered 386 running in the craphouse of a minicab office in Cairo."

    And other excellent quotes.

    I agree -- this is the best BOFH in a long time. Thank you, Simon! I'll be expecting my new keyboard shortly.

    1. Loud Speaker

      Re: Excellent!

      "a coal-powered 386 running in the craphouse of a minicab office in Cairo." - who told you about my "mainframe"? It was supposed to be a secret known only to my friends wearing black suits.

  13. 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".

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: On "decommissioning"

      Hell, I've (long, high entropy) passwords over thirty-five years old so unless there's a hair trigger lockout, I'm good. Just cycle through, high-value on down to low.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: On "decommissioning"

      It reminds me that scene of the decommissioning of a copier / fax machine with clubs and kicks. Excellent movie that one.

      I loved that scene, because there are some pieces of office furniture that deserve that treatment so bad.

  14. Rick Brasche

    this was needed a year ago

    maybe this scenario might have caused some common sense in our Management. But it's too late now, and we're barelling down the route the BOHF described

    1. Anonymous Coward
      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.

  15. Anonymous Coward
    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?

  16. Alan W. Rateliff, II

    A-freaking-men.

    All I have. This whole episode has played itself out in real life recently more than once.

  17. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Yeah...

    THIS

    If anyone can tell me why MS Exchange Online originating mail is being randomly rejected "due to security policies" with no particular reason given by retarded MimeCast/ZScaler/McAffee/Microsoft ingress filters, please do tell .... it never happened before.

  18. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge
    Headmaster

    One Nine would be 90%, surely.

    After all, Three Nines isn't 999%. Every additional nine is 90% of the remainder.

    1. 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.

      1. I ain't Spartacus Gold badge
        FAIL

        Re: One Nine would be 90%, surely.

        Our old email server had 5 Nein uptime...

      2. Sorry that handle is already taken. Silver badge

        Re: One Nine would be 90%, surely.

        The 'nines' is a reference to how many '9' are in the uptime statistics.

        Fortunately "90%" has one nine in it. Also.

        (However I haven't forgotten that it's a joke.)

        1. 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.

  19. Anonymous Coward
    Linux

    A Linux email server will fly on legacy hardware, with an uptime of 5 nines.

    1. 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.

  20. Wombling_Free

    Uncanny

    Or you happen to work for a certain large retailer.

  21. earl grey
    Pint

    disappeared?

    I was expecting to see "disappeared in a puff of smoke",

    but disappeared in a newly poured foundation is surely much more satisfying. More beer

  22. Anonymous Custard
    Trollface

    ...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...

    1. Keeees

      Re: ...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.

      <fx> Starts humming _I want to break free_...

  23. SolidSquid

    Surprised it wasn't just called Nine Uptime. Is it up? Nein!

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