revjim.net

About three years ago, at my place of employment, another department managed a system that we'll call SHIT. SHIT ran on a mainframe and was very old. On top of this, it cost a lot of money to keep up and most of the functionality of it had been replaced by newer systems. The group responsible for SHIT decided they were going to shut it down. The provisioners I support crapped their pants, believing this to be an essential tool to complete their daily work. It was decided, then, that my team would come up with a replacement for it. The old system maintainers dumped me pipe-delimited files of all the data which totalled around 25GB. I was also given an old HP LH Pro (200 Mhz Pentium Pro with about 30GB of storage space and 128MB RAM) running NT 4.0. At this point, using Linux for anything other than a personal workstation was unheard of and unacceptable.

I began loading the data into the MSSQL server on that box. The server was slow, and it was taking ages just to LOAD the data. Early tests of portions of the loaded data showed that data access time would be very slow. My team decided to switch to a Digital Unix/Informix based server that we were already using for other purposes. We really didn't have the disk space to spare, and of course we were working with no money to buy anything… but we didn't see much of a choice. My initial loading into Informix proved to be faster than MSSQL, but still taking way too long. Additionally, data access proved to be too slow to support the number of users we expected. But, we were going to have to live with it. The team started developing the Perl scripts to allow access to the data, as the database loading continued in the background.

I then got a bright idea the day before deployment. I installed Linux on the LH Pro without informing anyone of what I was doing. In a single night, I had all the data loaded into MySQL and my initial tests showed that data access speed was well within acceptable limits. I copied the Perl scripts over, and with a few modifications, everything was up and running.

The next day, the users began flooding in and the system held up. No one knew it was running Linux except me and the other developers. SHIT was running better and faster than it ever had. After a few weeks, I told my boss what I had done. He was skeptical at first, but the fact that it was working without problems convinced him to let it stay that way.

The system chugged along for 2 years without any more than an hour of maintenance (cleaning log files, etc). Then a disk went bad. I replaced the (very expensive and hard to find LH Pro hot swappable) disk, restored the data from backup tape and life went on.

Yesterday, the same disk died again, and it was decided that, instead of trying to find another disk for this old system, it would be easier to just bring up a new box with new disks and new hardware.

After three years of dedicated service, Speedy was put to rest last night at approximately 4:45pm CST. His dedication, charm, and ambition will be remembered most. He was a Linux pioneer, and a good friend. Private services will be held this morning at 10:00am. His replacement should be online by 8:00am tomorrow morning.