Lets make Friday 'Joke Day'!

My repeated statement to people when I worked at GloboMegaBank: “Nothing ever truly dies here.” I suspect there’s an old Sparc box doing something critical somewhere at that bank to this very day.

if it ain't broke....
 
if it ain't broke....
If it ain't broke, it will be. I spent a good part of my career making sure that when something breaks the operation doesn't. I'm a big fan of fault tolerance. When I went to work for a large online brokerage, the systems were what I can only describe as "fragile". If a single server or network switch had an issue, it was guaranteed to impact customers. Each system was its own unique, hand crafted little snowflake. Our corporate Internet-facing DNS was running on two obsolete Sparcstation boxes, both of which were connected to a single Ethernet hub. But, hey, it weren't broke.

I started there as a network engineer and later took over managing the *Nix teams. Before I left, you could have walked through the data center pulling random power cords or network cables and no customer would have ever seen an impact. Completely fault tolerant, and each set of servers (web, middleware, etc.) were identical. Not only was it not broke, it was as close to unbreakable as you could get.
 
We had a network consultant that coined the term "temporary permanent". Someone would propose a "temporary" solution, and he'd ask if it was temporary temporary, or temporary permanent. Everybody knew what he meant, and that it was a valid question.
 
My repeated statement to people when I worked at GloboMegaBank: “Nothing ever truly dies here.” I suspect there’s an old Sparc box doing something critical somewhere at that bank to this very day.
Just before I tossed it ...
 

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