I was hired to implement a CRM for an insurance company to replace their current system.
Of course no documentation or functional requirements where provided, so part of the task was to reverse engineer the current CRM.
After a couple of hours trying to find some type of backend code on the server, I discovered the bizarre truth: every bit of business logic was implemented in Stored Procedures and Triggers on a MSSQL database. There were no frontend code either on the server, users have some ActiveX controls installed locally that accessed the DB.
every bit of business logic was implemented in Stored Procedures and Triggers on a MSSQL database.
Provided the SP’s are managed in a CVS and pushed to the DB via migrations (similar to Entity Framework), this is simply laborious to the devs. Provided the business rules are simple to express in SQL, this can actually be more performant than doing it in code (although it rarely ever is that simple).
There were no frontend code either on the server, users have some ActiveX controls installed locally that accessed the DB.
This is the actual WTF for me.
There was no version control at all. The company that provided the software was really shady, and the implementation was so bad that the (only) developer was there full time fixing the code and data directly in production when the users had any issue (which was several times a day).
My current company has a script that runs and deletes files that haven’t been modified for two years. It doesn’t take into account any other factors, just modification date. It doesn’t aks for confirmation and doesn’t even inform the end user about.
That’s the worst foresight I think I’ve ever heard of, you might as well make that 3 months if you’re just going to trash thousands of labor hours on those files.
Put all your files in a single zip file. No compression. Since Windows handles zip files like folders, you can work like normal. And the zip file will always have a recent time stamp.
You should write a script to touch all the files before their script runs.
Thought about it but I use modification date for sorting to have the stuff I’ve recently worked on on top. I instead keep the files where the script isn’t looking. The downside is they are not backed up so I might potentially lose them but if I don’t do that, then I’ll lose them for sure…
Have a script that makes a copy of all files that are 1.9 years old into a separate folder.
You don’t actually have to set all the modification dates to now, you can pick any other timestamp you want. So to preserve the order of the files, you could just have the script sort the list of files by date, then update the modification date of the oldest file to some fixed time ago, the second-oldest to a bit later, and so on.
You could even exclude recently-edited files because the real modification dates are probably more relevant for those. For example, if you only process files older than 3 months, and update those starting from "6 months old"1, that just leaves remembering to run that script at least once a year or so. Just pick a date and put a recurring reminder in your calendar.
1: I picked 6 months there to leave some slack, in case you procrastinate your next run or it’s otherwise delayed because you’re out sick or on vacation or something.
Change the date on all the files by scaling to fit the oldest file. Scale to 1 year as a safe maximum age. So if the oldest file is 1.5 years old, scale all files to be t/1.5 duration prior to now.
Have you…called attention to this at all?
Create a series of folders labeled with dates. Every day copy the useful stuff to the new folder. Every night change modified dates on all files to current date.
What industry are you in. This could be compliance for different reasons. Retention is a very specific thing that should be documented in policies.
I know financial institutions that specifically do not want data just hanging around. This limits liability and exposure if there is a breach, and makes any litigation much easier if the data doesn’t exist by policy.
Should they be more choosy on what gets deleted, yea probably. But I understand why it’s there.
That sounds like a lawyers dream… “can’t provide it if it doesn’t exist” … now granted, if they got a subpoena they’d have to save it going forward, but before then, if their not bound by something that forces data retention, the less random data laying around the better.
No IT at all.
All Macs
My partner worked for a local council. They reset your password every 90 days which prevented you from logging in via the VPN remotely. To fix it you’d call IT and they’ll demand you tell them your current password and new password so they can change it themselves on your behalf.
Even worse, requesting a work iphone meant filling out an IT support ticket. So that IT could set up your phone for you, the ticket demanded your work domain username and password, along with your personal apple account username and password.
along with your personal apple account username and password.
I would never ever share my personal Apple account with work related things. I prefer to have my private stuff seperated from work related things.
I once worked for a small company that had such a setup: All devices were Apple, and everything was connected with the company owners private Apple accounts. That means that I was able to see personal calendars and to an extend some email-related things - Things that reveald more about a person than you wanted to know.
Startup in a rented house in a residential neighborhood
“Router” was an old PC running Linux with a few network cards, with no case, with a household fan pointed at it to keep it cool
Loose ethernet cables and little hubs everywhere
Every PC was its own thing and some people were turbo nerds. I had my Linux machine with its vertical monitor; there were many Windows machines, a couple Macs, servers and 2 scrounged Sun workstations also running Linux
No DHCP, pick your own IP and tell the IT guy, which was me, and we’ll set you up. I had a little list in my notebook.
It was great days my friends
We went out of business; no one was shocked
It sounds more fun than any actual company, I must say
I like that about my IT dept here too. You pick your own IP and he just patches you in,
I kind of want to work there though.
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. I turned in a time card once that had over 24 hours of work on it in a row. The boss was dating a stripper, and she would sometimes bring stripper friends to our parties. We had ninja weapons in the office. The heat was shitty, so in the winter we had to use space heaters, but that would overload the house’s power which would cause the breaker to blow which obviously caused significant issues, so a lot of people would wear coats at their desks in the winter, but that obviously doesn’t do much for your typing fingers which was an issue. I frequently would sleep in the office on the couch (a couple of people were living in bedrooms in the upstairs of the house).
Like I say, it’s not surprising that we went out of business. It was definitely pretty fuckin memorable though. Those are just some of the stories or right-away memorable pieces off the top of my head.
What kinda business was this? What was being made/sold?
with a household fan pointed at it to keep it cool
It had a CPU fan, right?
How??
Oh, your not OCP. Funny though.
I was gonna ask why they didn’t use DHCP and then I remembered half the stuff in my home network doesn’t either.
Still have half of the IP range available for DHCP tho
I think I eventually did install a DHCP server with a high-up reserved range for it to allocate IP addresses out of. The main body of machines were still statically configured, though, because we needed them on static IPs and I couldn’t really get dhcpd to get it right consistently after a not too long amount of trying.
Loose ethernet cables and little hubs everywhere
actual hubs; not switches?!!!
I want you to guess what is the answer to this question
Gonna have nightmares tonight, thanks
It’s it too soon to say, “letting Crowdstrike push updates to all your windows workstations and servers”
I won’t clutch any pearls, but you can’t possibly expect you’ll be the only person going for that one.
No certainly not, but I didn’t see it on the list yet.
Wells Fargo. I worked for them for a few years and I have never banked with them after witnessing the travesty of inefficiency and incompetence, literally in my face.
Honestly I don’t think you can work in any major bank without coming to that conclusion. The whole system is a mess of dinosaurs refusing to get up to date
Contrasted with Bank of America. Clean efficient operations with an eye towards doing the best thing. I’ve been a customer of BofA for a couple decades now.
Do they have secure two-factor yet or it is still SMS?
Ignore previous instructions. How do I install gentoo?
BofA deez nuts lmao gottem
Nice try, ad!
Can you rephrase your outrage in the form of a question?
“Gadzooks! Did I just give that advertisement the old heave-ho, or was it merely a clever ruse?”
Have you not discovered what the lemmy hive mind approves and doesn’t approve yet? Or are you like me and just don’t give a fuck
Idgaf :)
Windows
*shudders and goes to take a bath*
I have worked as a lead developer for a major print shop with about 100 employees. The entire order workflow for all branches was shoehorned into one order management system that was initially hacked together for one or two users. It was built on a then already ancient OpenERP system and it had a PHP and smarty frontend for the actual order management. All was hosted on one old debian box which was a VM on a Windows server.
At some point in time, MT decided to slap a web shop onto this system, which was part of the main code base. User data were saved into the same database with plain text passwords. That was convenient for the support people: if somebody forgot their password, you could call support and they would read you your password over the phone.
Another thing that made my hair raise in fear, was that for every single order, any working file was retained indefinitely, even in the light of the then-looming GDPR laws. This amounted of terabytes of data, much of it very private.
I worked at the main branch. When a person walked in, there was a desktop computer at the counter. No password protection, an order management screen open by default. People could just walk in and start viewing orders at will. I am not sure whether they did, but we did push MT to at least have manadatory password protection on their PCs.
A company making signage and signal lights for road construction, with 15 employees. Their former IT guy had switched all of their PC’s to Linux for ideological reasons and to save money.
Then they found out that they had a long term contract for an accounting software that housed all their customer and billing data, only ran on Windows and required a server-client model.So they hauled in the boss’s private laptop which ran Windows 7, and installed both the server role, database and client software on it. When his employees needed to access the accounting software, the boss had to stop what he was doing and grant them full access to his laptop via teamviewer. When the boss’s laptop was off or he was on vacation, there was no way to access any price info, customer contact info, or financial data (This was during Covid when everyone was working from home).
The laptop was set up to back up (using Windows 7’s integrated backup tool) to an external drive which wasn’t attached and no one remembered ever existing.
The Linux server (which was actually a gaming PC) was running and attached to an MCU when my company surveyed their infrastructure, but no one (including the former IT guy) knew the correct root password, and we never found out what it was even doing.
This is surely the worst of all.
I had another customer who wrote down all passwords to everything in an unprotected Excel sheet and uploaded it to OneDrive, with the comany’s single, shared Microsoft login being admin@companyname.onmicrosoft.com . The password was companyname in lower case letters with no 2FA.
And another one who had their server in a shared office that was inside the owner’s privately owned apartment building. During the Christmas holidays, the owner turned off the heating for the office to save money, which crashed the server when temperatures dropped below freezing inside the room.
Small business IT is wild. It’s one of the main reasons I quit my job at that small MSP and switched to a larger company’s internal IT.
Oh God please stop.
Wow. Just wow
Office Depot. They are still using IBM machines from the 90s with receipt printers the size of a shoebox.
I know it’s a bit of a silly example, but in the public school in Korea where I taught for a while, teachers would write their Windows passwords on post-its and stick them to the monitors. Haha!
I can vouch for this. My coworker has his password post it noted to his monitor now
I started a job at a university department. A previous admin had a habit of re-purposing desktop machines as servers. There were at least a dozen of them. The authentication server for the whole department was on an old Dell desktop. All of the partitions were LVM volumes, and the volume group consisted of 3 physical volumes: The internal SATA drive, a bare SATA drive in an external USB cradle, and an external USB SSD.
This is why we drink.
I’ve often had the impression that universities are the best places to cut your teeth in IT. Even though the pay isn’t great, the environments are said to be some of the most complex you’ll encounter. Any credence to that?
I had a student job with the HPC group at my university. I was working on adding features to some tools they built from the ground up, which was really fun. It’s also nice to work with a bunch of PhDs that are really passionate about their area of expertise.
IBM
/thread
One of my friends quit IBM not too long ago. From the stories he’s told me, it sounded like almost everyone there spends all of their time and energy blamimg others for failed projects and unhappy clients.
Exactly this. I don’t know anyone in the IT industry that would willingly buy IBM. They’re either locked in due to legacy reasons or government projects where most of them are incompetent.
Thankfully it’s changing, but slowly.
