BOFH: Lost licences
Now, if we all just work together...
Cloud storage: Lower cost and increase uptime
Episode 18
"I've lost some documents!" the Head of IT gasps, bounding into Mission Control with beads of sweat dotting his puffy red brow.
"Documents?" the PFY asks.
"Yes, I scanned our licence agreements into the computer and now they're gone!"
"Gone from your computer?" the PFY sighs, firing up the backup software.
"No, no, I put them into the content management system."
"Ah," the PFY sighs. "So they're gone alright."
"But I only put them in last week!"
"Uh-huh."
"It sent me an email telling me they'd been added to the system!"
"Yep."
"There was a link to the documents!!"
"Mmmmm."
"I TESTED IT!!"
"Course you did - and it worked the first time around didn't it?"
"Yes."
"And maybe you checked, a day later, just to be certain?"
"I did - and they were there! But they're not now!"
"No, they wouldn't be would they?"
"WHY NOT!?" he snarls.
"Because we bought a budget content management system. The one based around a relational database that the developers designed themselves."
"I..."
"The one we repeatedly told the company not to buy a couple of years back," I chip in.
"Yes, but it was..."
"The one that the developers abandoned development on six months later because we were the only UK customer to buy it."
"They weren't to know th..." the Head pleads.
"The one with the referential integrity of an Alzheimer's patient meaning a document will be there one day, gone the next and back - briefly - at some indeterminate time in the future?" the PFY says, really labouring the point now.
"Yes, yes, well it's done now, so how do we recover the data?"
"Recover?"
"Get it back into the content management system."
"It's already back," the PFY says. "It's in there somewhere, just the database indexing is corrupt."
"So can you uncorrupt it?"
"You mean do an index rebuild?"
"Yes," the Head sighs, seeing a happy ending.
"Sure - though there's only a small chance we'll get your docs back in the index but a large chance that we'll lose other documents from the index."
"How? Why?"
"Ok," I say, going to the whiteboard in lecture mode. "The database >scribble< >squeak< will rebuild indexes which are corrupt. The indexes got corrupt >scribble< >scribble< somehow, which means there's every chance that there's duplicates >squeak< >squeak< in the database - which in turn means that when you rebuild the indexes one of the dups will disappear >scribble<. Alternatively, because the integrity's so bad, we could delete >scribble< documents that the database can index in the hopes that when you rebuild the indexes >squeak< >squeak< the missing licence documents will reappear."
"We need those licenses back, so do what you have to!" the Head snaps.
"Which licences were they exactly?" the PFY asks.
"All of them."
"All... uh even the ones in the document safe!?" the PFY gasps.
"Yes - especially those."
"Our site licenses... for... everything?!"
"Yes, but if you get them back you ca..."
"You destroyed the originals didn't you?" I sigh.
"Of course. What's the point in scanning them if you're going to keep the documents?"
"What was the point in scanning them in the first place?"
"We needed space in the document vault for some new contracts."
"So you destroyed licence documents - some of which are proof-of-purchase, some of which are one-time licences and will not be reissued by the vendor."
"But as you say, they're still in the content management system somewhere. Can't you just do a search on the content management server and find them?"
"Don't be silly - no content management server allows that - or you'd be able to change systems to some cheaper vendor. No, a proper content management system makes it next to impossible to extract your content in any automated manner so that you're forced to use their product and pay their licence fees no matter how crap it is."
"But you said this wasn't a proper system."
"No, we said that this was a budget system - so it's worse. In their wisdom the designers adopted a file system model and split the files into 128K chunks with a pointer to the first chunk and a linked list thereafter. Once you lose the first pointer, it's gone - unless of course you rebuild the database and the right pointer wins."
"So we should delete some documents from the system?"
"In theory we should delete all the documents from the system to free up pointers then rebuild the indexes which should retrieve all the missing documents. But it'd take ages to do that..."
"Not if we work together," the Head gasps. "But - how do we get the existing documents back?"
"When we've rebuilt the index we extract all the recovered data files. Then we just recover the content management system from backups and reinsert the documents into it, safely."
"Right," the Head says, dashing off to get deleting.
"So when do we tell him that there's no index rebuild function?" the PFY asks.
"AFTER I ring that company that gives you £50 for dobbing in companies who pirate software..." I reply, picking up the Yellow Pages.
"But that would be after I discover that the backup utility on the content management system has been silently failing for months...All of which would be a week or so before we tell him that the licences were only colour photocopies of the originals in the tape safes..."
"It's a plan!" the PFY chirps.
COMMENTS
Far too obvious
The BOFH has the originals in the safe???
C'mon, he would NEVER have done that in the old days...he'd have sold them on the black market, sabotaged the CM server, then blackmailed the PHB to buy more from a supplier where he was guaranteed to get a backhander.
And what's with the feeble revenge from last time? His rival is still alive???? WTF?
He's going soft!
This is why we're brewing our own
Our entire competitive advantage comes from our internal processes, but we've reached the physical capacity of doing it the "old fashioned way" and as such have to roll it all into an information system.
Naturally, we could hire someone else to do it or buy some product or get some SAP consultants, but we feel that in the end, that would tend to conform our processes to fit the system, rather than the system to fit our processes, so we've enlisted a few programmers and two of our officers with experience in systems design (they were consultants before joining our venture) have taken the lead positions. The system stands to be a completely integrated package joining together a content management system, financial system, call center system, inventory management, warehouse and supply chain management, order and customer management, communications management, and literally every other corner of our processes and needs with a ridiculous amount of flexibility for change while still enforcing completeness (since our various sites do things differently and indeed processes change dynamically on a customer-basis)
The CMS posed a very imposing problem. We didn't REALLY need to build our own, but the vendors we talked to and looked at were all sharks. Even open source solutions were shady and seemed untrustworthy. So, that part of the project sat dormant until one of the project managers, sipping a coffee at a meeting, said "Why don't we just make a database table with a couple columns - an identifier, some description columns, and a freakin' binary field" - and thus our CMS was born. It's elegant in its simplicity - documents related to other objects in the database are referenced FROM those objects rather than from the content (after all, how often do you start an inquiry into a customer transaction with an image of the receipt and then backtrace to the initial order placment?). Documents that stand alone are described sufficiently to be locateable in the description fields.
The only real technical challenge in making the perfect CMS for our needs was distributing that particular table off the main database servers - which consisted of a great, big, RTFM.
YMMV, do not attempt to duplicate this course of action without proper consultation and investigation into alternatives.
They are right about KM databases though
This business about making them difficult to access is so right! Proprietry "extensions" to SQL - clever pointers - proprietry APIs... The whole ECMS/KM industry is a mess.
Bureaucrats have another reason not to supply information!!
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