[Gllug] Geographcial server failover

[Nix]

On Wed, 26 Jan 2005, Richard Cottrill complained:
>> There's at least one more critical system than that that springs to
>> mind: telco call-routing (and to a lesser extent usage-tracking) and
>> exchange systems. If they fail, at the best the telco starts
>> haemorrhaging money at titanic speeds; at worst, 999 calls fail, and
>> people die.
> 
> I find myself in the novel position of not just disagreeing, but even
> disbelieveing one of Nix's emails. It had to happen eventually.

Feel free. Virtually everything I say is total horsefeathers anyway:
this one comes from six-year-old memories and may very well be wrong.

(I'd like a way to attach annotations of estimated-correctness to
sentences: you can do something like that compactly in some languages,
but not English. Dammit.)

> <war stories>
> Ah telcos, bless em. I have recent experience of a telco I worked for who
> had regular failures of their billing system, constant in fact. It did go

Oh, sorry, I don't really know the terminology here. It's not the system
which prints the bills I'm talking about: I'm aware that's probably a
heap of crap.

It's the system that records that `this person has phoned this number
for this long'; the info without which the bills can't be printed.

> right up the the CEO after a few months,

I'll have to remember that phrase. :))

> Why is billing an issue like call-routing? If the billing system doesn't
> think you credit worthy, your call won't even make it into the ether. 999

Well, if you manage to bugger it up over a large enough area, you might
find yourself rejecting all calls for entire cities. This doesn't seem
to me to be entirely a good thing (nor is it something I've heard of
happening modulo major cable fires and things like that).

> is exempt though, but I think the company in question has had issues with
> that too.

!!!! *BOGGLE*

> <rants>
> I would be shocked if BT *hadn't* had serious interruptions to service,
> ever; my money's on recently.

What, whole cities cut off? With the penalties they have to pay if 999
calls don't work? (What is it, one month's line rental per cut off day
or something like that?)

> The IBMs, Accentures, and the rest (including my current employer) have a

(and mine :( I'm reviewing code written by a bunch of contractors who
shall remain nameless, down in Bangalore... god it's hideous; they have
less understanding of the basics of programming than I did when I was
ten.)

> lot to answer for in gutting the "top end" of IT of technical skills, and
> replacing it with crap and spin.

That's the managerialist culture in action, a system which says that all
that matters is talking to people and having big meetings, not anything
like actual skill at the job you're meant to do. (Anyone with real
skills either gets promoted to management where he can be incompetent,
or ignored because he's not a manager.)

Bah. A world run by idiots. Ignorant idiots.

>                                  There are whole swathes of the industry
> who don't understand what (or why) best (or even acceptable) practice is.

`Best practice' == `take no risks, talk plausible-sounding tosh, charge
through the nose and ship something that only just works and that is
unmaintainable enough that they have to get *us* back to maintain it'.

> </rants>
> </war stories>

I've been there. Oh yes. :(((

-- 
`Blish is clearly in love with language. Unfortunately,
 language dislikes him intensely.' --- Russ Allbery
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