Posts by Fustbariclation 13 publicly visible posts • joined 17 May 2017
Now let's hope the 'feedback' from their pensioners gets them to do something about the Pensioner Experience...
Maybe HP has forgotten that customers are only one, admittedly very important, of many stakeholders.
To be fair, this is not really the fault of the automated change system not being tested properly - though that is probably one contributing factor.
It's really a failure of the change remediation not being tested properly.
If you want to move quickly, and accept that failure is a possibility - a luxury not afforded those running nuclear power stations - then you really do need to make sure you have a very effective roll-back solution, that is bulletproof.
That it took them six hours, and a site-visit, to roll back the faulty configuration change, establishes that it was not properly designed and tested.
The moral of the story is that, if you're modifying BGP automatically, you need, first, to design the safety-net, by writing, and testing, code that will reset it all to its last known working state -- reliably, every time.
To fail-fast, you must be able to reset-fast.
Turbo Pascal was brilliant - particularly its object-orientated add-ons.
I wrote a simulator for an X.25 network using it, and it made the job really easy - I just made each switching node an object and you could construct large networks with ease, simply by creating a new node object and linking it to its neighbours. Brilliantly easy.
It worked so well that the figures I produced for new nodes being rolled out on the network we managed were so accurate that, when one wasn't performing within the time my model predicted, they called the Bundespost PTT to complain, and had the line fixed until it matched my figure, rather than complaining, as I'd expected, to me, that my numbers were wrong.
It was all a mistake, really. At a meeting our customer asked if we could produce projected performance figures, and, without thinking, we foolishly agreed - both my colleague and I thinking the other had a solution.
We should really have gone back and explained that predicting terminal performance was impossible - the maths boffins assured me that it was, because queuing theory wasn't good enough for a multiple node network. Still, I had my newly purchased Turbo Pascal, and thought it worth a try. It was hard work, but I had the figures to them within ten days.
APL is a wonderful language - I even, for a time, had an APL terminal and keyboard in my garage for my HP 3000 machine that had an interpreter.
I think it makes the ideal teaching language, because it is so intuitive.
There's a brilliant on-line site where you can try out APL:
https://tryapl.org
Well, I've used it -- it was the best language to use on the HP 2100A, because you needed only one paper tape, because Algol 60 was designed to work with a single pass compiler. Apart from it being a better language anyway.
FORTRAN IV, as it was then, needed a two paper tapes. So, even for a little FORTRAN program, you had to load the first pass compiler tape (then wind it up on its spool), then put your program tape through and get the intermediate tape. You'd then load the second compiler paper tape, and feed it the intermediate tape. It would then produce the binary. If anything went wrong, you had to start again.
Even then proper design made a huge difference. Declaring your variables first, and declaring functions before you use them, makes good sense anyway, and has the excellent side-effect of improving usability by one-pass compilation.
Things that go bang at one of the busiest weekends of the year are almost certainly capacity problems - which are difficult to fix.
When you read of staff having been retrenched recently, it makes it even more likely it's a capacity problem.
Experienced, technical staff, with a sound knowledge of the systems, and their history, are expensive and rare. Their value is not obvious as they tend not to be top-flight communicators and are not that keen on blowing their own trumpets either.
The first you notice of their absence is usually just this, a very big bang, that appears to come from nowhere and with nobody knowing how to fix it.
Capacity errors are also notorious for being immune to defences like removing spofs by having multiple data centres.
They can release it as FOSS. Yes, they'd have to reveal stuff that was still used. That would be the choice, do that, or support it.
Just because your code is Open Source does not mean that it is free. M$ could release XP as Open Source, but still charge people who used a more recent closed-source version called something else.
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