Servers Everywhere

There is something calming about a new machine, particularly the “Server” variety (note the capitalization—there will be a quiz when this post is finished). This hardware has been untainted, untouched, unfouled by the hands of another sysadmin, doing godknowswhat with it.

Those in the IT profession, I hear your cries of “Who the fuck installed <stupid application> on this server?!” It has happened, many times over.

However, there are other times when Servers are unutilized. Case in point: My old job at Citizens Bank.

You see, back then they needed a (desperate) upgrade to a new box. In came a $6,000 monstrocity, also known as the Xeon Powerhouse. Of course, in today’s standards its Hella Crappy, but back then that was the hot shit. And oh man did it process some work. Instead of chugging along for 6+ hours (10+ during month-end processing) on our dual Pentium Pro, this bad boy would finish it in two hours.

This discovery led to my schedule being insanely elastic for the next six months or so. I could use the word “hectic” but I’d rather throw in deep, subtle underwear references whenever I get a chance. Let’s move on.

Anyway, my point is that one day I discovered this box had some pretty impressive services on it that we had no idea how to use. I stumbled on a file share with dozens of folders. Inside those folders were small windows programs such as a Terminal program, a Print Control program, and others. This led to, of course, me tinkering with them like crazy and seeing just how much I could modify, control, and tweak in hopes of making the thing even more efficient.

While this sometimes leads to Amazing Discoveries (not unlike the infomercial of the same name), it also leads to Complete Fucking Disasters brought to you by the good folks at OhShit Plumbing and Electric.

Fortunately I can’t say I went off the deep end and into latter territory, but I did inadvertendly make life a little harder for everyone by discovering that the great Terminal program that was rocking for myself and my boss couldn’t scale. Scale meaning that we rolled out said Terminal program to most of the main office, somewhere around 30 employees.

This is the part in the anime series called My Bank JoJo-Rush where hijinks would ensue. Not so, for your dear author. No, instead, I got an earful from just about everyone. They wanted the program to work—it was basically a clone of the legacy terminals used before the employees got PCs—so it was familiar and they were desperate to cling on to the Ways of ‘Ole. But it was not meant to be. After trying several things, including a call to the banking software company (who told me prompty to Cut That Shit Out And Just Use the Win32 Binaries), we buried the Terminal program deep in the recesses of each client machine, using it only for our tasks and ours alone.

Sometimes we would get longing looks when we logged in to the telnet-type interface, quickly and speedily typing in our commands with no need for menus or toolbars, but that passed in time. The lesson I learned was not only that sometimes there are great things to be found if you dig hard enough, there is also such a thing called Going Too Far. That program was perfect for me and my boss. The idea of going bank-wide was something akin to Utopia, where Everything Works but in actuality Nothing Works.

But now I have a new, fresh server, with a new RAID array setup by myself, configured and installed just so, humming along quietly behind me.

It’s good to the King, baby.

I’ve been on some other planet
So come pick me up, I’ve landed

Tags: Servers, Back Up, 16-bit, Banking, Software