Switching customers from Linux to BSD because boring is good • The Register
https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/08/switching_from_linux_to_bsd/
@sullybiker Interesting. About 20 years ago, a large private school system I used to work for finally got around to demolishing the interior of an old building. In the process, they found a Novell Netware server, still running, that much earlier remodeling had walled up inside a storage closet.
Sounds to me like old Netware rules the reliability roost!
@dancingtreefrog That poor server! At a place I worked they had some print server that had been up for around a decade that was down to the final working disk, and they were scared to ever reboot it.
@sullybiker
Oh, the first real job I had in Hawaii was with a consulting service that ran their financial accounting on a very old Prime minicomputer. When they went to wipe its array of disks (spread across a wall of cabinets), they set off a wave of disk failure messages. I guess the hardware had been on the edge of failure for years, as disk controllers silently correct for errors until forced to wipe disk sectors they'd left alone for years.
@dancingtreefrog We had someone set up a marketing material workflow using an old mac as some kind of batch server. They left and nobody knew about it for years. Until one day it stopped working.
@sullybiker
Isn't it fun when documenting things is something marked as "todo" but never done? My first tech writing job was to document a heavily-custonized Financial Accounting system so they could replace it (see Prime above).
I spent the last seven months (before I retired) completing *and documenting* all my business/systems analyst projects, and everything for managing the corporate ECM.
Great feeling: it's completed, they have everything they need. The past is past, now for my future!
@sullybiker
It was tough. We all knew it was working but no one around remembered where it was physically located until the building contractors found it. The joys of life in schools, where a mission-critical server might be under a teacher's desk.
Same employer also had a first-generation HP Laserjet printer hooked up to their mainframe accounting system. It spent ages printing financial reports and checks - hundreds of pages each day.
Old stuff was just built better, I guess.