Brittle COTS Applications

Timbo on 2003-08-14T20:06:10

I do application support for a living... one step above helpdesk, but at least the hours suck. Anyway, an application I support (which, incidentally, is considered mission critical by the company I work for) is dependent on:

  • A consumer grade workstation without a UPS
  • Exchange
  • Multiple NT 4.0 shares
  • Oracle running on AIX
  • Microsoft !@#^ing Access 97
  • A service running on a Windows NT 4.0 server
  • Citrix running on yet another server
  • Two separate Network Appliance servers
  • Various network infrastructure, including two WAN links

    Needless to say, my sleep patterns have been less than regular in the six weeks I have had to support this beast. On the third day of support, I submitted a stability plan but was told there wasn't enough money to fix it.

    Just call me Sisyphus.