Well not quite the same but national rail doesn't know what server runs it's now depreciated train alerts system. The one that sends texts when your train is running late. They shut down the web page that lets you set up the alerts ages ago and confirmed to me that they were shutting the system down, however I still received alerts until very recently when the alert expired. I even got reminder texts that my alert was due to expire with a link to a now non existent page. It's a shame they shut it down, it was a useful feature!
Posts by Gazzat5
3 publicly visible posts • joined 4 Oct 2021
Developer wrote a critical app and forgot where it ran – until it stopped running
If you have a fan, and want this company to stay in business, bring it to IT now
Firewalls? Pfft – it's no match for my mighty spares-bin PC
Monday 4th October 2021 18:17 GMT
Bodged rack mount server
Reminds me of a bodged up server I built while working at a high school. We need a sever to run a single app (SIMS, the school database interface) via remote desktop for electronic registration due to the separate computer networks for admin and students. So we dug out a copy of server 2003 (I believe it was the enterprise flavor) and builtba server with SCSI disks in raid 5 configuration. All was well until I realised the order of the disk IDs didn't aligh with the order of the physical drives and my boss was a bit anal about things so we decided to scrub it and rebuild it in the correct order in case a drive failed in the future and a drive needed replacing at least we'd know which one it was.
Anyway when I went to rebuild the SCSI array, it never came up again so in the end we scratched the SCSI interface and stuck a single desktop IDE HDD in the single interface the machine had and built the server off that. The server had 32GB of ram (a hell of a lot in those days) to support all the instances of SIMS it would run (one for each teacher in the school during registration) and am IDE hard drive to load the software and OS off. It worked but it wasn't pretty. The drive was hanging loose in what would've been a cd bay lol.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
