[Gllug] IT disaster in British public authority caused by operator

[Nix]

On Tue, 14 Dec 2004, mimo at restoel.net muttered drunkenly:
> Sharon Kimble wrote:
> 
>>On Saturday 11 Dec 2004 23:35, Nix wrote:
>>
>>>How utterly shocking and completely surprising. I'm stunned at this
>>>unexpected news. EDS responsible for a computing disaster? Surely they
>>>jest. That could never be. All EDS's projects go off perfectly without
>>>flaw or failure, and they have a superb reputation, which is why the
>>>government keep using them over and over again.
>>>
>>>Isn't it?
>>>
> Sounds like another microsoft story  (is this the same story the guardian reported some weeks ago?) - is it?

The tale I hear is that the EDS people pushed the XP SP2 (?) service
pack out to the DWP network, but instead of pushing it only to the
(seven?) XP machines, they pushed it to all umpty-ump thousand desktop
boxes, following which none of them would boot, so they had to walk
around reinstalling Windows on each of them by hand and restoring them
from backups.

I boggle at two facts:
- that anyone could miss that this operation was taking thousands of
  times longer than expected (!)
- that an XP service pack is willing to try to install itself on
  a non-XP machine. (That's just insane.)

-- 
`The sword we forged has turned upon us
 Only now, at the end of all things do we see
 The lamp-bearer dies; only the lamp burns on.'
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