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Customer for over 10 years, a new consultant arrives (for other sectors) and decides that the current server setup is 'obsolete'. They want 'cloud' or 'centralization of services in one of the various offices'. Completely unfeasible for their reality, but I’ve already written enough about this.
This morning, one of their employees calls me saying 'the servers are unreachable' and that 'the consultant says this is yet another demonstration that we need to move to the cloud.'
I sent him to check. I sent him because I want them to realize what is happening. For the fourth time in a month, the network cable connecting one of the servers has been disconnected from the switch. The switch is only accessible by authorized personnel, meaning this employee and the consultant.
I can't claim that it was purposely disconnected by someone with access to the room (certainly not by the one who’s calling me), otherwise I risk a defamation lawsuit. But the dishonesty of certain individuals still leaves me speechless, even after many years.
@as400@mas.toTwo words I "love":
1. obsolete
2. legacy
Everything in IT that is not marketed on big tech conferences is considered legacy and obsolete by these consultants.
Good news is - he knew which cable was ethernet :) In few years these consultants will have no idea how it looks like. Then we'll have only software defined cables and EAAS - Ethernet As A Service :)
Well, in infosec these terms have a very concrete meaning - systems or software that is no longer supported by the vendor, and thus creates a vulnerability by the mere presence of unpatched software. Think medical software running on Windows XP in hospitals which then routinely complaining about “falling victims to ransomware” because these computers also happened to be processing random files downloaded from the Internet, which they could freely access.
I share your sentiment that there’s plenty of hype in IT and I remember most of them over the last 30 years. We had “16-bit” hype, then we had “32-bit” hype, then we had “thin client” hype, then “multimedia” hype, then we had web browsers effectively reimplementing every single feature of a typical operating system so it’s not like I’m sharing the excitement of “AI”, “cloud” or “web 3.0” hype.
But even if you run a rock-solid service on FreeBSD, you have to periodically upgrade both the application, the server and all auxiliary apps, otherwise you’ll end up serving SSL 3.0 with RC4 as the primary offered cipher. And at some point the vendor will no longer support the platform or stop maintaining the application at all, at which point it becomes “deprecated”.
I suppose it's not the case where FreeBSD or an app runs unpatched for years.
As to the hypes. My favourite one was "client-server" architecture sponsored by microsoft. Where they claimed that terminal-server architecture is legacy.
Then all the J2EE applications came. And suddenly terminal-server architecture was reimplemented where terminal was represented by a browser.
All in all it seems like these "legacy" concepts are not as useless as big tech claims.
