Terminal downgrade saves the day after a client/server heist
- Reference: 1662103692
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2022/09/02/on_call/
- Source link:
This week meet a reader we’ve Regomized as “Walter” who in the early 1990s took a temporary job working for a finance company that funded car purchases.
“The work was simply keying and validating finance requests from the public and doing the admin of notifying public and garages that finance had cleared or been declined,” Walter recalled.
[1]
In his first week, Walter was put to work on an app that required a green screen monitor. Walter determined what he was really using was a terminal connected to an IBM AS400, Big Blue’s minicomputer.
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But when he showed up to work for week two, a shiny new Digital Equipment Corporation PC sat on his desk.
This beast boasted a Pentium PC, two whole megabytes of memory and a whopping 400-megabyte hard drive.
[4]
That spinning rust contraption stored a program that added colour and movement to the AS/400 application.
But this leap into modernity and the marvelous world of client/server lasted just a week, because when Walter showed up for his third week of work he was greeted by police cars in the car park and crime scene tape all over what was left of the office building’s front door.
Said door showed clear signs of having been ram-raided, the once fashionable crime that saw crims steal a car, drive it through a shop window or office door, grab some loot and then speed off.
[5]
Ram raiders often targeted high end fashion or jewelry stores
This lot had lifted the finance company’s shiny new PCs. Which was less stupid than it sounds: new Pentium PCs were definitely a four-figure purchase at the time.
Cue panic: as Walter tells the tale, the company he was temping for processed hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of loans every day. Execs from the local office manager to head office suits were all panicking that the org would be unable to do business for the weeks it would take to source and install replacement PCs.
[6]Doctor gave patients the wrong test results due to 'printer problems'
[7]This is the military – you can't just delete your history like you're 15
[8]NOBODY PRINT! Selfless hero saves typing pool from carbon catastrophe
Which was when it was pointed out that the green screen terminals remained on site, locked in an upstairs room waiting for the IT team to come and collect them for disposal.
The AS/400 also remained in place, in a locked room with its lights blinking merrily.
Thirty minutes later, a downgrade to the terminals had been completed and work resumed.
“We confirmed that the new app meant nothing, and there was a collective sigh of relief,” Walter said.
If you've ever saved the day with a downgrade, let us know by [9]sending a message to On Call . ®
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[6] https://www.theregister.com/2022/08/26/on_call/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/08/on_call/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2022/07/01/on_call/
[9] mailto:oncall@theregister.com
[10] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Green screens were great!
During the 1970's green (bright green, and not so bright) screens were great. If yours broke, you just wheeled another one in, plugged it in and you could start working immediately,
30 years later, when my laptop had a problem - it got sent off to be fixed, and was given a loan machine. Of course this loan machine only had the basic software - it took a week to get all of the software I needed installed (and configured),by which time my original machine was fixed!
It was interesting to see the trend of "very thin" desktop/laptops to avoid this problem - all your software and data is stored "in the cloud" - just like it was in the 1970s. You just have a browser to access it.
I also remember being around as colour screens were being developed, and people came from a bank to see it. (This was pre graphics) A banking executive asked "Why do we need colour". Someone said "it allows the bank statements to show overdrawn in red", and the executive was persuaded, and put in an order.
Re: Green screens were great!
Maaany years ago I was a techie at our European HQ and was an early beta tester for Windows 98. I was the first user globally (in our company) to have a 2 monitor desktop. For months I had a caravan of vistors from our EU offices and Japan HQ who generally stood behind me and pointed and cooed.
Re: Green screens were great!
"all your software and data is stored "in the cloud" - just like it was in the 1970s. You just have a browser to access it."
Yes, great, until it's a cloudless day (as in, the internet is down or the supplier goes TITSUP). Then you can't do anything. Call me a grumpy old git, but I like having my stuff local so that it runs when I want it to independent of anyone else. External storage (potentially even "the Cloud") is great for stuff like backups, but imho not a substitute for local.
Re: Green screens were great!
Google docs let’s you cache stuff locally for those cloudless days or when travelling or when wanting to work offline etc.
Re: Green screens were great!
It works both ways, we use OneDrive at work and that maintains a local copy of files so I can work when travelling, internet is down etc. It just re-syncs when I'm back online which works pretty well if I'm honest.
I'm less impressed however that OneDrive running in the background prevents you from attaching open files to e-mails etc. Very annoying to have to close a spreadsheet to attach it to an e-mail before re-opening it again. Still, I imagine it's beyond Microsoft's capabilities to figure out a solution to something so primitive...
In the innocent times of the Swedish 90s, the place I'm at now got broken into, and all they left with was lots and lots of RAM chips from the servers and workstations, probably SIMMS of a few MB each :)
So like any company short of a few MBs of RAM would do, they ordered in replacements and fitted them to get everything going again. Apparently it didn't take long for the thieves to know this is exactly what would happen, as the new RAM was plundered not long after. Cue a third order, along with some better security!
RAM removal
In the no-so-innocent times of the London 90s something highly similar happened to the department in our building that used Sun equipment. The thieves got in via the temporary (permanent) scaffolding put up round the building for maintenance and emptied the kit of RAM. Apparently it was rather expensive and difficult to get hold of at the time, and obviously a lot easier to abscond with just the RAM instead of the entire systems.
Re: RAM removal
At my uni a security guard stole a number of lab PCs. The PCs were not a big deal - the high speed data acquisition cards were. Those likely ended up in landfill somewhere, because noone needs those. Those did cost an order of magnitude more than the rest of the PC, so that was quite problematic for the institute.
And in a place I used to live, our basement storage compartment was forced open. They made off with two cases of bottled water (I guess ~€5 deposit each), fixing the door cost ~€60 or so. Eejits.
I heard of a company back in the 80s that bought a bunch of IBM XTs. Their place got broken into overnight, however the thieves only took the monitors and keyboards - not the base units. The hypothesis is that they were used to BBCs, Apples etc. where the computer is built into the chassis that houses the keyboard and must have thought the base unit was just a fancy monitor stand or something.
I bet they had fun trying to get the "stolen" computers to work later...
Remote development
Went on an MS Azure training course many years ago and the MS trainer pointed out that his dev machine was actually a remote desktop, running in Azure.
It was very handy when his laptop was stolen as he just got a replacement and carried on as if nothing had happened.
Unfortunately, with some of the customers I have to deal with, even a modest downgrade from current standards would still be an massive upgrade on what they are running their critical systems on.
Ah - being raided by thieves ....
Way back when (2001) I worked for a company who had a satellite office in the middle of nowhere near Leeds (it had been acquired in a buyout).
One weekend thieves broke in and ripped all the 1990s PCs out. But only to use to smash the windows of an adjacent office that had modern day tech.
If LISA PAM means anything to you, you may have been there :)
"the new app meant nothing"
Ah, so just like a lot of "upgrades" today, then ?
Cisco stuff
Not exactly the same story but close.
Back in the 00s, in the shittiest company I've ever worked for, big one, with a big DC, we had a routine op, with a colleague: insert a 24 cat5 ports card in one of the 4 Cisco 6509 of the DC.
Easy: one lifts all cables, and the other slides the card gently in the chassis.
Except, it did NOT go as planned: as soon as the last gentle push was done, a big bang occurred and we ended up with a down whole chassis, unable to switch it back on again.
Long story short: we replaced the chassis with an old one coming from the basement, moved all cards to it (minus the one creating the whole incident) and were back in business in 2 hours.
Turned up the fried chassis died because it was (like everything else) recycled and the idiot that removed a card last time bended the male power plug of the back plane. So we shorted it when we inserted the card, frying the chassis.
I remember this email I sent to the c**t who was serving as CIO that day, who was suggesting to make sure it didn't re-occur (what a fecking good idea, CIO !), basically telling him + world "yes, good idea. We should stop re-using old kit and procure for new one, since this was the root cause.". Did not get an answer, I wonder why ... Didn't get funding for DC kit either ...
So whatever did happen to ram raiding?
I guess it doesn't work so well on electric mopeds...
Waiting for the cybertruck with enough RAM and a RAID array.
Text based computer interface
When I was in high school computers were growing their first thin roots in general education. PCs were still expensive and difficult to paintain* in working order. My school bought a lab worth of PCs with windows on them and additionally got some really old boxes from a bank as a donation. The bank PCs weren't powerful enough for Windows at that time, nor were reasonable desktop options available on Linux, so our lab manager installed the then free Red Hat on them with CLI only, together with Lynx, Pine etc.
The lab was open to general studentry during brakes (home PCs were still rare and hunger for the Internet was huge even though xxx was strictly verboten) and with one PC for every 30 pupils only the sharp elbowed got their vaunted online time. The white on black screens with their blinking cursors, howere, remained vacant all the time. Yes, it was then that I learned to love the blinking cursor - one could get everything done on those machines, since the only use for graphical display connected to the Internet was banned anyway and, worse, the ban was strictly enforced.
It was good times. Textual information would be conveyed in text form, not a JPEG or a TikTok dance, Brin and Page were yet to apply for the grant for their Lego server, which only later turned into the privacy, social and ecological nightmare we are having now, the systemd guy was still bullying his kindergarten mates and not the whole world... I'd hazard a guess that the only thing those machines would struggle with today is TLS, the rest would still be quite serviceable, if we managed to keep to text. (I quite like curent KDE though:)
Icon: happy Friday!
* Originally a typo but I'm keeping it as like the word!
Re: Text based computer interface
Upvoted for "paintain".
Ah, the equivalent of a modern day rollback!
Give Walter a cold one for that quick thinking! I have also grabbed an old system of the shelf and put it back in production, I seem to remember a McAfee ePO all in one box that had to be resurrected for a short time while the kinks in the newer system were straightened out.